Engineers Without Borders
program: Improving Rwanda's water system
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EWB participant Evan
Parks (uppper right) meets with Rwandan children last summer.
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 ivil and Environment Engineering student Evan
Parks went to Rwanda this past summer thinking he would help install
a reliable water system. The trip ended up changing his life.
Parks, a senior majoring in geological engineering,
went to the strife-ridden African country as part of UW-Madison’s
Engineers Without Borders program. The EWB program, populated
largely by engineering students, seeks to create sustainable engineering
projects in impoverished areas both in the United States and abroad.
Parks got involved with the UW-Madison EWB chapter
last year, and took interest in its Rwandan projects. The country has
been torn apart by a civil war, and is one of the poorest of African
countries. According to Professor
Peter Bosscher, who advises the campus EWB chapter, Rwanda it has
little working infrastructure, and basic necessities like clean water
and sewage systems are lacking in much of the country.
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Clean water for drinking and
cooking is a scarce resource in Rwanda.Many parts of Rwanda lack
proper water systems.
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Because the country is so poor, communities have
to rely on rudimentary water systems. Villagers are often forced to
walk several miles to obtain water if their local system breaks down,
and often that water is untreated, Parks said.
The UW-Madison EWB chapter focused its efforts on
the Muramba Deanery, an area of about 300,000 people served by four
churches of the Muramba Parish. Muramba is one of the poorest areas
of Rwanda, according to Bosscher, and has received little government
assistance in building up its basic infrastructure system.
Nine members of the UW-Madison EWB chapter, along
with Bosscher, traveled to Muramba in June to work on local projects
for two weeks. The group of students worked on improving a gravity-fed
water system that supplies much of the water for Muramba. Because of
the country’s extremely mountainous terrain, it’s difficult
to build centralized water systems, Parks said. So drinking water has
to be found and delivered locally.
“It’s a difficult work environment,”
he said. “They don’t have basic infrastructure like we think
of it. We like to compartmentalize as engineers. In Rwanda, it’s
all the same problem.”
In addition to working on the gravity-fed water system,
the group of students have worked with Muramba residents to encourage
them to develop practical skills, such as welding and pipe-fitting,
that will help sustain the water system and other improvements. Bosscher
said one of the key goals of the EWB program is to develop sustainable
projects—ones that the residents of Muramba can sustain on their
own after the engineering students have left.
For Parks, the work on the water system project inspired
him to go back this coming summer. There’s more work to be done,
he said—establishing medical clinics, securing the health of children,
and building better schools for a citizenry in which formal education
beyond the 4th grade is rare.
“Rwanda is both beautiful and terrible,”
he said. “It has terrible, gripping poverty and a legacy of war
and genocide. People survive in terrible conditions.”
Yet Banks said he was at times overwhelmed by the
welcome reception accorded the EWB students from the Muramban residents.
They embraced the work of the students, dedicated themselves to building
on the group’s projects, and urged them to come back.
Banks said he can’t wait. “In my opinion,
the most important thing we did was build a relationship with this community,”
he said. “We built a foundation.”
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