Engineers Without Borders
U.Va. engineering students share their expertise
By Lauralee Thornton
While most U.Va. students worked part-time jobs or lazed
on the beach last summer, Aaron Johnson, a fourth-year computer
science major, and Girish Ratanpal, a Ph.D. candidate in
electrical engineering, put their educations to work for
communities in less-developed countries.
Johnson
traveled to Juarez, Mexico, where he helped Robert Marquez,
a visiting faculty member at U.Va. in environmental engineering,
conduct a number of pollution tests on a brick kiln —
one that uses less wood, reduces air pollutants, and wastes
less brick than those in general use. Ratanpal flew to South
Africa, Botswana and Mozambique with the University’s
Department of Environmental Sciences to identify projects
for U.Va. engineering students to tackle in the future.
“ I really feel like my engineering education should
benefit the people who need it most,” Johnson said.
Johnson and Ratanpal pursued opportunities for volunteer
service under the auspices of Engineers Without Borders,
an organization founded in France in 1971 on the model of
Medecins Sans Frontiers [Doctors Without Borders]. Imported
into the United States in 2000 and established at the University
of Colorado at Boulder, the program quickly spread across
the country to universities such as Columbia, UC-Berkeley,
Dartmouth and Virginia Tech.
Johnson first learned of the program through a friend at
North Carolina State University, where a group already had
been organized. He founded the U.Va. chapter of Engineers
Without Borders in March 2002 to enable graduate and undergraduate
students to travel to developing countries and use their
knowledge to provide sustainable and long-term benefits.
About 50 U.Va. students attended the first meeting, more
than a dozen attend biweekly meetings and nearly 150 are
on the organization’s mailing list, Johnson said.
The program has received institutional support from the
University’s Center for Global Health, which funded
Johnson’s trip to Mexico with a $1,700 grant, and the
Department of Environmental Sciences, which covered Ratanpal’s
travel expenses with a $1,600 grant.
The philosophy of the group determines what types of projects
are selected, Johnson said.
“We think in terms of sustainability,” he said.
“Environmental, economic and cultural sustainability
are central to a successful project.”
The goal is for local communities to adopt the projects
once the students leave, so the projects must be low-tech
and low-cost, built with locally available materials that
can be maintained by people with little training.
Projects also must be appropriate to the locality. Instead
of suggesting projects to the communities, students help
the residents address problems they identify for themselves.
“ A project should have a minimal effect on lifestyle,
but a maximum effect on quality of life,” Johnson said.
“It is important to tread lightly on local practices.”
The U.Va. group is planning a trip to Mexico next summer.
While in Juarez, Johnson discovered that 2.5 million people
were using the same aquifer for all their needs — water
for drinking, washing and irrigation. But the underground
source of water was inadequate for such heavy demand and
couldn’t replenish the supply of clean, potable water
fast enough.
So, a team of students is preparing to travel to Juarez
next year to construct simple water distillers from readily
available materials — such as solar distillers made
from the metal roofs of old buses —to purify ground
water and increase the supply of clean drinking water. In
addition, each student will complete a secondary project,
ranging from compiling new databases of social and scientific
information to studies of violence toward women.
“ The people benefiting from the projects will be
the poor people living in a ring around Juarez, in areas
called colonias,” said Johnson. “Many of these
people are employed in foreign factories but their pay doesn’t
allow for a high standard of living. Sanitation is minimal,
people build their own homes from found materials, and many
are actually squatting on other people’s land.”
So far, the U.Va. engineering students have had no trouble
finding worthwhile projects, but locating sources of funding
has been more challenging.
“ There are thankfully a few scholarships we can apply
for, such as the Center for Global Health Award or the Harrison
Award,” Johnson said. “The problem is that, for
those awards, we can’t apply as an engineering team,
only individually. It would be great if the Engineering
School could find a way to fund team projects like these,
projects that are both educational and humanitarian, in
the future.”
Luckily, the low-tech projects do not require much funding
to be high-impact, he said. Each team member going to Juarez
this summer needs only about $2,000 to cover travel and
living expenses for the six-week project.
The group welcomes any students who wish to join, Johnson
said.
lthough mechanical and civil engineering students are needed,
students with cultural and linguistic skills are also necessary.
“The Engineers Without Borders program certainly needs
more than technical knowledge,” Johnson said.
