CU's Engineers Without Frontiers brings hope, water to a needy world

By Kate Becker

In the parched winter soil of Limpopo, South Africa, spinach, melons and potatoes are waiting for the brief summer rains to come. In September, water from the deluge will quickly be soaked up by the soil, leaving the land dry again when winter returns.

CU graduate student Douglas Mitarotonda, center, teaches computer programming to students at an Internet center in Tuzla, Bosnia. EWF/Cornell

But Shawhin Roudbari, a graduate student in Cornell's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working to help rural communities hold on to more of this precious resource. He is spending three months this summer designing and building rainwater storage tanks and installing them in eight South African villages, supported by a partnership of the International Water Management Institute, a research organization headquartered in Sri Lanka, and Engineers Without Frontiers USA (EWF-USA), a national nonprofit group based at Cornell.

Capturing rainwater from a roof through a simple technique called rainwater harvesting produces enough water to maintain a garden throughout the dry season, said Roudbari.

He is one of six EWF-USA volunteers who are using their engineering skills to make a difference overseas this summer. Instead of putting pencil to paper in their classrooms at universities like Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the volunteers are putting hammer to nail in countries from South Africa to Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the process, they are learning how community service engineering projects can be a force for social change, particularly in the developing and crisis-torn worlds.

"Projects are not just focusing on engineering, and the solutions are not just technical," said executive director Regina Clewlow. The insights of anthropologists and political scientists, for example, can put a community's technical needs into the broader context needed to devise holistic solutions, she said, and sometimes can result in simple and inexpensive devices.

More than 30 students from MIT, Stanford University, Cornell and other institutions have had their EWF-USA internships or projects funded since the Cornell office was opened less than two years ago. The office now supports 27 university chapters, including one at Cornell, representing 400 students across the United States. Clewlow, who finished her master of engineering degree at Cornell in 2002, co-founded the organization with Krishna S. Athreya, director of Engineering Minority and Women's Programs at Cornell. The U.S. affiliate is supported by the university's College of Engineering, Einaudi Center for International Studies and Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy.

EWF-USA is an offshoot of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a Canadian organization founded by two students at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in 2000 on the model of the international medical relief organization Médecins Sans Frontiéres (Doctors Without Borders). EWB has grown from a handful of students into an international organization with 2,500 members.

Appropriately, Cornell, as the home of the U.S. organization and a student chapter, has made community-service technology an academic course and this spring offered it for credit through the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Students in the class worked on two projects, one helping the local Tompkins County library develop technology to make library resources accessible to patrons with low vision.

"We really try to make sure that it's an academic experience," said Rachel Davidson, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, who co-taught the course, which is to be offered every semester. Volunteers "get a lot more out of the experience if they reflect on it," Davidson said.

This fall -- coincidentally, around the time Roudbari's water tanks will get their first taste of rain -- Cornell will host EWF-USA's first national conference, "Bridging the Divide," Sept. 17-20. Clewlow expects that close to 200 students and professionals from around the globe will attend.

The conference will combine technical workshops with lectures by a diverse set of speakers, including Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, and Patricia Galloway, president-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

To the students who have journeyed to distant places to share their knowledge, the experience has been more than completing engineering projects. Douglas Mitarotonda, a Cornell computer science graduate student, is teaching Java programming to adults and university and high school students in Tuzla, Bosnia, and helping develop a Web site that will aid local government, businesses and nongovernmental organizations. "I think the biggest surprise that I have found is how optimistic people are here. ... There is not a strong feeling of hate and anger," Mitarotonda wrote in an e-mail. "People are just trying to move on with life."

And Roudbari said that perhaps the most satisfying part of his stay in South Africa is teaching villagers how to build their own rainwater storage tanks, meaning that the gardens of Limpopo will keep growing throughout the winter and for generations to come.

For more information on EWF-USA and its national conference, visit this Web site: http://www.ewf-usa.org.