Engineers Without Borders

We are moving forward with the drinking water and irrigation projects in Bolivia. The project application has been submitted and we expect it to be approved any day now. Earlier this month we received notice about a possible grant opportunity for water related projects in Latin America. This was discussed during our first Bolivia Project Team meeting and a consensus was obtained that we should apply.

Our thoughts are simply this; if we can get the money to conduct the site assessment trip in January or February then it might be possible to complete the design activities in time for a Summer 2009 implementation. This would accelerate the project timeline a full year!

Another bit of good news. The $500 gift from ITT Corporation was delayed in getting here. Now that does not sound like good news but in reality it was. Boeing has recently announced a 2-times matching grant for donations. Our $500 will thus garner another $1,000 for EWB. Exactly how much of that we will get is unknown at the moment.

The grant application has been completed and submitted. We put together a one-page summary of the project which may be accessed here: Zuncallo Summary and we actually have some pictures too! Mike Keyse from our partners in Bolivia, Engineers In Actions, sent me some pictures that he had taken earlier. These pictures are in the same valley as Zuncallo but they were not able to get all the way to the community which is apparently a little further up (down?) the valley. They are however, very representative of the conditions we will encounter in Zuncallo.

The project application is nearly completed for the Zuncallo, Comucala Irrigation Project!  I’ll publish a project summary shortly. Here are a few extracts:

Country: Bolivia

Region/State: La Paz/Camacho

Location in Country: 310 km NW of La Paz

Communities: Zuncallo, Comucala

The mission is to provide social, economic, and engineering assistance to the above communities for a period of at least five years. These communities are located high in the Andes mountains in western Bolivia where Zuncallo is home to 100 families and Comucala has 60 families. Farming is the primary occupation with most plots being one to two acres in size. In order to sustain and grow the agriculture business, a reliable source of irrigation is needed for both communities.

Our initial focus is to propose a solution to the village’s irrigation and drinking water needs. We intend to monitor and follow up with the villages to determine if the initial solutions were successful; and then to develop other solutions which will enable these small-farm enterprises to become more profitable.

Positive impacts include cleaner and safer drinking water for the inhabitants of the village. This will increase the overall health of the people by reducing sickness and death related to water-borne diseases. With the implementation of an irrigation system we expect the village will be able to grow higher-value cash crops over a longer growing season. This will allow the people to more effectively market their agricultural goods and generate a higher level of income thus increasing their standard of living.

The villages are 75% Catholic and 25% Protestant. The people speak the Aymara language and are of native Bolivian descent.

The initial site assessment visit is scheduled for June 2009.

In January 2008 the US Air Force Academy Student Chapter was officially recognized and has become an active partner with us. We look forward to mentoring and providing technical assistance to this group of excited young men and women.

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs made an initial effort to from a student chapter in 2008 but was unable to sustain the necessary level of interest and has now gone inactive.