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Engineers Without Borders
—Laura Oman, junior, environmental engineering, and Engineers Without Borders member No Tech student is more passionate about Engineers Without Borders (EWB), which links engineering with worldwide community service, than Laura Oman from Marinette, Wisconsin. The junior in environmental engineering is interested in surface water quality and rural development in third-world countries. The field is a logical one for her: both of her parents worked in natural resources, so she was raised with what she calls "environmental awareness." The resulting ethic led her to join Tech's chapter of EWB when it formed. Oman started out just interested in the group, but quickly became immersed, and is now president. "I hope to be a good leader," she says. "Someone who listens, not just tells." She participated in the group that headed to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, over Thanksgiving break in 2005. The project was in a poor barrio but provided her with a rich experience. Oman says that Santa Cruz has seven rings of settlement, and that the city is laid out the opposite of cities and suburbs in the United States. In Santa Cruz, the central ring is the richest part of the city, and the farther out from the city center, the poorer the people. The barrio where the Michigan Tech team worked, Buen Samaritano, Spanish for "Good Samaritan," was on the fringe of the seventh ring—a one-hour bus ride from riches to need. Oman says, "It was very poor but the people were welcoming. They were some of the happiest people I've ever met."
The days were hot; the labor hard. They had no machinery. They dug dirt, mixed and poured cement, and laid brick. "Everyone has to try their hand at bricklaying," Oman says. "It's pretty fun." The team built a septic tank that was fifteen feet long, fifteen feet wide, and ten feet deep. They also dug forty-foot trenches for a drain field and constructed a toilet house. The budget for the venture was $16,000, covering construction materials as well as accommodations for the group at a nearby mission (with facilities). The chapter came up with the money from student fees and from "massive" fund-raisers in Houghton preceding the trip. Team members had to foot one-half of the $900 airfare to make sure they had a "vested interest" in the project. The message, Oman says, was, "This is not a free, sightseeing trip. This is serious." The project reinforced her own aspirations. "I really hope to work in creating sustainable solutions to problems. I don't want to make something that works for a day. I want to make something that works for a very long time—something that other people can learn from, and other people will benefit from." Learning What's Important in Life
Oman and her fellow students learned much in Bolivia, including the fact that plenty isn't necessarily a lot. "Everything is in excess here in the United States," she says. "I don't need five sweatshirts, but I have them. Just the sheer mass of stuff that we have in our homes—toys, everything—we don't need all that stuff." Bolivians were content with little, she says. Now back home in the US, Oman's goals range from the practical to the lofty—running a good meeting, formulating guidelines for choosing projects, instilling excitement in other students. She and another team are working on a clean-water system for a small, remote town in Guatemala. "Michigan Tech is really lucky in that we have a lot of international projects already," she says. "A lot of EWB chapters in the US are searching for projects. We have a multitude—more than we could ever hope to build." She sums up the program as a combination of "service" and "partnerships," and she embraces all of it. "I like the satisfaction of knowing that I'm not just doing something for a grade—that this is actually helping people. It's easier to do a lot of work when there's a purpose to it. In Bolivia, we saw the school; we met the kids; we met the people who really wanted this. That's big for me." It's big for many women. All of the officers of Tech's EWB chapter are women. Oman attended a national EWB conference in February and noticed a preponderance of women there, too. She suspects that women are attracted to EWB because of the emphasis on service. "It kind of appeals to the nurturing side of someone's personality." She found life in another country intriguing. She learned to appreciate a siesta, lunch as the biggest meal of the day, and how to play rock, paper, scissors in Spanish. But what she valued most was how appreciative the people were. "It was hard to leave. I cried when I had to say goodbye to all my little friends. I loved the kids." Students With Passion
The Michigan Tech chapter of Engineers Without Borders was organized in 2005 with ten students; now there are seventy-five. A big draw is that students can get involved in their first year and work until the last day of the doctoral degree. "It covers not only all degree levels but all majors," says Assistant Professor Kurt Paterson, a co-advisor of the program. Paterson, who has taught at Tech for ten years, says that students, not faculty, organized the program. "This group has made me appreciate how valuable student energy is. It's an example of what I call purposeful, applied activism. The students that join us tend to be thoughtful, helpful people. They all seem to be driven by this really cool mix of energy and intellect and sweat and hard work." And there is no shortage of projects for that kind of passion. Identifying new tasks is easy because of two other international programs at Tech that pinpoint need: International Senior Design, which has seniors designing solutions to problems in developing communities, and four Master's International programs that combine service in the Peace Corps with a master's degree. The project in Bolivia was Tech's first, and seven students ventured with Paterson and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering David Watkins, the lead advisor of Tech's EWB chapter. Watkins describes the Bolivia project in one word: "ambitious." "It's amazing to me that the students pulled it off," he says. The team prepared for six months for the ten-day effort. At the outset, there were no funds, no contacts, no logistics—just plans to follow and bake sales to raise money.
Watkins says the adventure was lively of spirit but also heavy of heart. Three weeks before the trip, a young woman on the team, Danielle Fawn Ladwig, contracted yellow fever from her yellow-fever vaccination and died. "It was extremely rare and tragic," Watkins says. "We had grief to work through." The biggest benefit for the rest of the students, Watkins says, was exposure to other ways of the world. The per capita income in Bolivia is about $1,000 per year," he says. "I think it's good for students to realize that the American way isn't how the majority of the world lives." Tech Grad Leads EWB-USA
EWB-USA began modestly enough in 2000 when a group of Colorado college students in a practical applications class traveled to Belize and built a small rain pump for a village. A wellspring followed: today, roughly four thousand students in two hundred chapters nationwide traverse the world to help people. Leslie, a Peace Corps veteran from the 1980s, first became involved in EWB in 2002, when she was the mentor for a student group that traveled to Mali to undertake a program for harvesting rainwater. The project proved gratifying, Leslie was hooked, and now she leads the organization, overseeing the day-to-day operations, fund-raising, and lining up new projects.
Leslie says nearly one-half of EWB-USA participants are women drawn to service; but man or woman, the touchstone of the program is the same: "It's important to educate a new generation of engineers to do humanitarian work—to put a heart and a face back into engineering, instead of just profit and technology. There's nothing wrong with profit, but it ought not drive everything. That's why we become engineers—to design and build to help people." The biggest hurdle for Leslie and her staff of three is success. EWB has become an artesian well of goodwill, and students from all over the country are wanting in. Leslie says, "The participation is overwhelming us." |
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© 2006, Michigan Tech Magazine |
Michigan Tech Magazine | Fall 2006 | http://www.mtu.edu/ |
Language was a challenge, but not a barrier. "It's amazing how much you can communicate with your hands, or your facial expressions, or drawing in the dirt," she says. "We didn't speak the same language, but we still could understand each other."
The communities that EWB helps must buy into the soundness of these projects. "If they don't take stock in it," she says, "then it's wasted time." Accordingly, EWB students build community education—how to engineer and maintain clean water—into their projects.
Watkins says that the motto of the endeavor was "Be flexible." The biggest adjustment was tackling work above and beyond the plan. Upon arrival, the team found that the school not only did not have a septic system, it had no toilet house. So the group tackled that project, too. They didn't quite finish it, but left behind money for completion.
Catherine Leslie '83 (pictured left) has an open hand and an open heart these days. Leslie, whose degree is in civil engineering, is president and executive director of EWB-USA, a job that wears her out, but she wouldn't trade it for the world. The volunteer work takes about twenty hours per week on top of her regular employment. "I get tired," she says, "but I'm not sorry I'm doing it in the least. I love it."
Leslie, a native of northern Minnesota, is a manager at Tetra Tech, Inc., a large engineering consulting firm in Longmont, Colorado, where EWB-USA is headquartered.