With the closest Home Depot thousands of miles and an ocean away, a team of engineering majors used their bare hands to shovel soil and rocks and snake 400 feet of blue piping from riverbed to village this summer. The job is half-way done.
The hand-shoveling was a decidedly primitive approach, especially considering the computer analysis and design calculations done in classes here.
But in Thailand, where these engineering majors were, just getting the water to run downhill was the challenge. The engineering students are part of the university chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a student group that has traveled to Thailand, Brazil and Ecuador to build engineering projects designed by students.
For those students involved – who are mostly engineering majors but the program is open to all students – the trips provide real-life classrooms in a way no other university course could, several students said.
The Thailand project began last January when two university students, their professor and a professional engineer set out to the village of Bann Bo Mai, located deep in the Thai highlands.
Students traveled in a rickety van up the steep, rocky roads to their destination: An orphanage housing about 30 Lahu refugee children in desperate need of clean running water. They took a week to analyze the terrain, determine how much piping they would need and survey the Lahu locals’ health and desire to cooperate.
“You want to do everything at once if you can, but it’s such strenuous work,” said Eli Goldstein, a senior civil engineering major.
Students lived inside the orphanage, slept on stiff bamboo mats and ate a bowl of rice for every meal. They would wake up at 6 a.m. and work every day until dusk, digging an underground path by hand and hoe to bring the water about half-way to the village, Goldstein said.
The Lahu were once a nomadic mountain tribe, growing opium to buy their daily rice. In the early 1980s, China helped the Lahu to rebel against the Burmese government. Years later, the Burmese retaliated by torturing and slaughtering thousands of ethnic minorities including the Lahu, Amnesty International reported.
Since then, they’ve settled in Thailand, where they are not considered citizens but are accepted as a “hill tribe.”
“They can go from resistance fighters and turn around and set up a peaceful community with an orphanage,” said advisor Deborah Goodings. “They’re making a new life for themselves. A hard life, but it’s not going out robbing people.”
Although the project was only half finished in June, Goodings and another group of students plan to finish the project in January. They will build a sand filter that will kill the water-borne parasites, making it safe for drinking.
When Goodings returns in January, it will mark the start of the group’s third year. About 50 students have traveled on five separate projects, Goodings said, noting that the group has become a leader on the East Coast for other Engineers Without Borders chapters.
“The University of Maryland has one of the longest standing chapters,” said Cathy Leslie, the executive director of the national Engineers Without Borders organization. “Chapters come and they go, and University of Maryland has done a great job of keeping the projects going even though students graduated.”
Nationwide, the number of college or university Engineers Without Borders chapters has swelled from the founding chapter at the University of Colorado-Boulder six years ago, to 150 chapters today.
Besides the orphanage project in Thailand, students here built latrines in Ecuador and a water tank in Brazil.
The university’s first trip in 2004 was also to Thailand, where they were paired with the University of California-Los Angeles and Columbia University. That trip was arranged by the national chapter, but since then, students or non-profit organization contacts have helped pick the sites for the group’s expeditions, Goodings said.
Students design all of the projects, help order the materials and do the physical labor alongside the villagers. A university professor and engineers from the field join each team and oversee the design process. So far, all projects – after overcoming any engineering undertaking’s unavoidable setbacks – have succeeded.
“The student leaders are good, but they are not engineers. Sometimes they are forgetting things they don’t know they’re forgetting; sometimes they remember things I forget, so we work together,” Goodings said.
Including material cost and transportation, each trip costs about $30,000. The university donates about half of those funds, Goodings said, and has inspired several students to change career plans to focus on the sustainable development approach the group takes when taking on projects.
Alumnus Bitsat Yohannes helped lead the Ecuador project this summer after joining the university group to the country last year. After a bad childhood experience in her birth country of Ethiopia, when a dentist used a hot piece of metal to numb her gums and remove a tooth, Yohannes wanted to become a dentist – one who didn’t hurt people.
But entering her senior year, she returned from Ecuador, embraced two 21-credit semesters and graduated with a biological resource engineering major in May.
“I’ve been working for three months now and most of the things I learned came from Engineers Without Borders,” said Yohannes, who received a job at engineering firm Black and Veatch thanks in part to contacts gained from the Ecuador project. “In class … there’s only one right answer, just one number is the solution. In the real world, that’s not how it works.”
Thomas Wild, the Thailand project’s co-leader, reflected similar gratitude toward the rare opportunity Engineers Without Borders offers.
“The kind of experience we have working on this project … that’s not something you can do at our age,” Wild said. “You can learn from a textbook, but actually making a decision and seeing it come together is much different.”
Contact reporter Ben Block at blockdbk@gmail.com
