Engineers Without Borders International Experience Summary:
I have been working with the Engineers Without Borders organization since the beginning of my college career and have been getting more involved with the organization throughout my time at UC. I am currently the chapter's Historian and a member of the Nyambogo Committee which works on creating a water system for the people of Nyambogo, Tanzania. The water system, before the trip, was serving many members of the community, but was not serving enough members to be self-sustaining. This means that the well was not making enough money for the people of the community to pay the workers. In order to make this project self-sustaining, our group took a trip to lay pipelines in order to provide more community members with the opportunity to purchase the water. This implementation trip allowed us to build the pipelines that will allow our water system to start serving more people in the area. This experience is personally meaningful to me because I am very passionate about service. I have always tried to do my best to help others and provide them with what they need. This project will provide a larger community with a reliable source of clean drinking water and will provide more jobs for the community. This experience also allowed me to interact with the people that we are helping through our project and will gave me the opportunity to see the world since I had never been out of the United States before the trip. This trip gave me a much better perspective on the life of people in developing countries. Before the trip I always thought that the people in these poor areas hated their lives and were waiting for someone to help them but through traveling there I have realized that the people in these places are much happier than some of the people living in the United States. They realize that there are problems and that they need clean water but they all loved their community and it was home to them. This taught me that these people do not have a worse way of living than we do, rather they just have a different way of living. My favorite memory from the trip was when we were waiting for one of the tanks that we put in to fill up and the people who lived in the houses there all gathered around us. We were singing and dancing with them and playing with the children. Everyone was very happy and the community members all thanked us for the work we were doing.
Sample Work:
The following slideshow shows pictures off all of the work that we did in Nyambogo. It is impossible to grasp the full beauty of the country and the people through these pictures but they do show some of the Tanzanian culture. They also show many of the things that did each day while we were there. Some of the things that we did while we were there included laying out pipes, connecting the pipes, building tap stands and air release valves, brainstorming ways to fix problems, and teaching the community how to run the system and make repairs and expansions whenever they need to. When we work in a community, the emphasis is always on partnership. The community owns the system so they always make the final decision. The people in the community are very intelligent they just do not always have the resources so that is where we help.