EWB 1001- Intro to Development Work

In Summer 2016 I traveled down to Northern Peru with 3 other students with Engineers Without Borders to build a clean water system in a the community of Huacapongo. This project has taken 4 years and has gone through many design iterations and failures. After our team completed implementing the water system, I was overall relieved because we were one step closer to this project being complete.

June 22, 2017

We have successfully implemented the Huacapongo Water System & it feels awesome! :^) This morning we had our final meeting with the JASS, Diego, Lucas and Elvira & we cracked open a cold one. Lunch was really interesting because we didn’t only talk business, we made jokes & I could see the personalities of these people. This past year at meetings we had talked about these people and now I was at lunch in their house in Peru getting to know them personally. Truly a unique experience.

It’s hard to tell how this trip has changed my life, but I know it has. After community night last night I was working with Francesco and I was like DAMN. We did this. This is important. It’s difficult to see how much something has changed your life or your perspective when you are so close to it.

I don’t know if I will continue development work, part of me wants to but something is holding me back, I don’t know what it is though.

After I returned home from Peru, the water project we implemented became clogged with sand and the flow became insufficient. This winter our team is sending down 3 students to troubleshoot the system.

This past semester I decided to complete an independent study under the founder of Engineers Without Borders. Through this process, I noticed where our project began to fail and I learned how to avoid these problems when our team begins to assess future communities. Below is the conclusion from my independent study.

I became a member of Engineers Without Borders – CU Peru during the Fall of 2016. The project had already been through several years of assessment, and the travel team had just returned after a failed implementation. When I started Engineers Without Borders, I immediately became so invested in the community of Huacapongo and how to fix the problem presented. Since I have been on the team, the problem has always been: how can we lower the turbidity enough to make the chlorine effective enough to kill the E.Coli in the water. Throughout the year, designs were made and I was chosen to be a member of the travel team that implemented the water system in 2017.

When arriving in Huacapongo, the questions I had been asking for months were all presented at my feet. For months I had been searching for the exact location of the community and the catchment boxes on Google Earth, thinking about the community members and ways I could impact their lives. All of the obstacles that we thought we had to face such as traveling after a devastating flood or building a road were all nonexistent and the only obstacle that was left to face was lowering the turbidity of the water.

The system was implemented and the water was tested to have a turbidity of 0.5 NTU instead of the 10 NTU of the previous system. The E.Coli and coliform water tests proved that the implementation was successful at lowering the turbidity and killing the E.Coli in the water. We reached our goal and we left Peru with a sigh of relief because after 4 years, the system was finally built.

After returning to the United States, life at the University of Colorado Boulder returned back to normal and I settled back into the routine of academics. After the leadership of the Peru team got settled in, we decided to meet and call Diego, the president of the JASS, to see how the water system was working. He told us that the water was perfectly clean but that the flow had significantly decreased because of the sand clogging the geotextile fabric. The past 4 months have consisted weekly calls to Diego and the team trying to troubleshoot solutions from the United States.

Diego has been going to the water catchments several times per week to clean the sand or the geotextile fabric so the community can have water. Throughout the duration of the project, he has been trying to get more people to split the time and load of fixing the problem, but the community members are uninterested. The community members are complaining about the lack of water, but no one is willing to help fix the problem. The complication of this project shifted from needing to lower the turbidity of the water to needing to increase the flow of the water, and it appears that the two factors are inversely related. The problem presented now is quantity or quality, and the answer has to be community driven.

Would the community members rather have less water that is pathogen free, or more water that has E.Coli? Is there a way that we can find a balance in providing less turbid water at the same quantity? Is the problem the sand becoming increasingly compacted or the sand clogging the geotextile fabric? How can we create long term solutions while limiting the amount of time the JASS spends on maintenance? Should we remove the geotextile fabric to maintain flow? If the geotextile fabric is removed, is there any difference in this system than the original system? How can we know the results of removing the geotextile fabric without actually removing the geotextile fabric? Did our team solve problems or create them? Why is only one member of the community invested in this project? Did the community need our help to begin with? How can I help this community while I am in the United States?

As we prepare a team to travel to Huacapongo this winter for a monitoring and evaluation trip, we have to create solutions for the problems presented, and many of the solutions include continuing to modify the system until the proper amount of flow is provided. Additionally, the team intends to meet with a community in the same region with intents to open doors to potentially start assessing a new project in Summer 2018.

How can we think of starting a new project while our last one is not completed? Are we taking resources away from Huacapongo, or reallocating them to a community that has the potential to be successful? What makes us think we are qualified to do any of this?

As of now, it is impossible to know the final results of the Huacapongo Water System. Whether the project is successful in providing clean water at a necessary flow, or the project fails and the geotextile fabric is cut, the water system is still better than it was when we arrived in Huacapongo in 2014. The biggest takeaway is: how can we take what we have learned and do it better next time?