The CEISMC Gazette

Engineering Students Without Borders Aid Town in Honduras

by Andrew Kerr
May 2007
The CEISMC Gazette

Engineers Without Borders is a national organization dedicated to providing engineering solutions to improve the quality of life for people in developing countries. The Georgia Tech branch of the organization, Engineering Students Without Borders (ESWB), has been working on a water-quality project in La Lima, a town in the Honduras. I spoke with Geosystems Civil Engineering graduate student and ESWB technical team leader Douglas Cortes about this.

Q - How did you get involved in Engineering Students Without Borders?

A - I come from a country in South America—Colombia—so I've seen firsthand the needs of our developing countries. I was interested in trying to help out and do something. I was a civil engineering student, undergrad at the time, and I was taking a lot of technical classes. I felt I was in a position to help, and so I joined the organization.

Q - How do you "get" a project?

A - The way it works is that communities around the world contact the main organization, Engineers Without Borders. Engineers Without Borders posts a lot of projects about what communities around the world need. Student chapters in different schools adopt the projects and start working on them.

There are different ways of getting a project. One would be looking over what is posted on the website. The other one is: you can contact the community directly, help them go through an application process to get the project going in the main organization, and then become the chapter that adopts the project.

Q - Are all Georgia Tech students eligibile for this?

A - Yes, any student. Although it's technical and is mostly oriented to civil engineering, we have students that come from different backgrounds—students in computer science or biology or industrial engineering. It doesn't have to be seniors or juniors; it can be freshmen or sophomores. We partner a student that expresses interest in different parts of the project with students that have the knowledge and expertise.

Q - Where around the world is your organization primarily focused?

A - Right now we're working in Latin America. I believe we have projects in Ecuador and Bolivia, and our main project is in Honduras, and I think we are looking into something in Haiti, but there is nothing clear about it yet.

Q - What was it like the first time you flew out to Honduras to meet with the people in La Lima you were assisting?

A - I was not on the first trip. But from what I can see, the first time we were there we got a lot of data. We started trying to model the system, and when we were modeling the system there was a lot of stuff that was not making much sense based on what we had. So we had to have a second trip and have a reality check.

The things that we saw on this trip...the information that we got on the first one wasn't that reliable. We were counting on the people knowing where the distribution system piping was located, but we found out that they didn't have really the knowledge of where the things were, and where the piping was buried, so we had to reassess our approach to the project.

Q - How did La Lima's water distribution come to be in the first place?

A - Apparently it was an engineering project that was designed for about a hundred homes done about 35 to 40 years ago. Right now they have 200 homes, so they tap into a system and they try to get water, but the system was not designed for that many homes. So it's overloaded.

If people on the end of the pipe don't have any water, they tap the line that is closer to the well or the tank, and so they drain that pipe also. Right now they have a pretty poor distribution system in terms of piping. They use an elevated tank to provide water pressure for the community, and it seems the tank is not high enough to provide enough pressure.

Q - What was your schedule like once you got down there?

A - We were down there only for a spring break, so it was seven days. We had so many things that we wanted to do that we were afraid we wouldn't be able to accomplish them all. As soon as we got off the airplane we were expecting to have meetings. We were trying to get a hold of the whole community and tell them what we were doing during the week, because we would need their help. But the way it works down there is not as fast. We had a meeting the night we got there, and then the meeting we were expecting to have with the whole community, we didn't have it until the next day. So even though we wanted to do a lot of stuff and be quick about it, the community slowed us down a little bit because that's the pace at which you do things in Latin America, I would say. In the end we accommodated to local customs and finished doing everything that we wanted to.

Q - It would seem that with such a short period of time to do things, you have to basically engineer quick and dirty solutions to some problems while simultaneously coming up with better long-term solutions for others.

A - That is correct. You plan for worst case scenarios, you try to anticipate things that will come up that are unexpected, but you cannot account for everything. So once you're there there are things that you have to do on the spot.

We were running some tests, and one of the pipes was rusted to the point where it started to break. So we had to figure a way of getting data without breaking the whole system. So there are things that come up where you have to fix it on the spot.

Q - What's next for the La Lima project?

A - Right now we believe we have all the information we need to come up with a design, so we hope to complete the design and give them probably three different solutions they can choose from. We hope to finish all this design process by August and to send them a package where they will find at least three different solutions—in plain language so they can understand what are the pros and cons of each of them. We will work with them and come up with a solution that we believe is best for them and that they agree with. We are trying to start construction by the spring next year.

Q - Are students compensated in any way for this work, or is it strictly volunteer?

A - This work is mostly done by volunteers. It's hard to tell a volunteer to not study for a test because he has to finish something on the project, so last fall we had a class that would give three hours of credit for the students in ESWB to work on the project.

Right now we have a small group working during the summer because most people are not here taking classes then. We have industrial engineering students working on the logistics of the project, talking to constructors and looking for materials. We have a couple of freshman and sophomores; some of them are interested in the construction part, the design and modeling, and some of them are interested in the water distribution and water quality. The students who have been involved in the project since two or three semesters ago and have good knowledge of what's going on here are paired with those new students.

I'm working on the geotechnical aspects of the project, we have somebody else who is in hydraulics and he's a graduate student as well, so he's taking care of all the modeling and piping distribution design, and we have a couple of students, sophomores and freshman, that are working with him on that. We also have students that have taken classes in hydraulics, or in water quality and are taking care of proposing the system that will take care of quality issues in the water.

Q - This seems to be a great model for how things are done in the real world, as people from different disciplines come together to engineer solutions to problems.

A - As civil engineers we, well, I haven't taken much of the water quality classes. We're mostly concerned about building stuff. So it's fun how even the students like me that are doing geosystems can learn a lot about testing for water quality from some of the students that come from different backgrounds.

Q - Why do you do this? Why should we help developing countries at all?

A - I come from a country that has a lot of need and problems. Fortunately, I've been lucky to have a good standard of living. But I know there's no such thing as a free lunch. The fact that I have a good standard of living is related to others not having a good style of living. So I believe it is my, you can call it "my moral duty," let's say, to do something about it.