By Jackie Pearce
Rajesh Punjabi usually spends the holidays in New Jersey with his family and girlfriend. But instead of trekking home this December, Punjabi and other members of Northeastern’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) flew to Central America, where they designed and implemented a safe water system for an entire village in Honduras.
Through the efforts of Northeastern’s EWB, the 350 villagers of El Chaguite will be provided with clean and constant water. Punjabi, who has been on three trips with the organization, said the old system was inadequate to serve El Chaguite’s 60 homes, two churches and a school.
“The people in the village who even get water typically only get it for two hours everyday,” said Punjabi, a junior civil engineering major. “The old system wasn’t built for capacity. It was built for 20 houses.”
El Chaiguite is the EWB’s third project building water systems. Their first two assignments were also completed in Honduras, in the nearby villages of El Tecuan and Los Planes. The villages were all chosen by the organization ACTS (American Caring Teaching and Sharing), active in the area for 20 years and familiar with villages that have an inadequate water supply.
After ACTS proposed El Chaguite as the next site to build a new water system at, EWB sent a small team to gather the raw information needed to design a system back in Boston. The EWB’s 40 engineers, architects and other specialists spent six months at Northeastern analyzing contour maps, water tests and interviews with families to determine the most appropriate system for El Chaguite.
The team spent the last two weeks in Honduras implementing its system, returning just in time for New Years Eve. Although the task is far from finished, Punjabi said they’ve already improved conditions for the villagers.
“The day we left, they had 33 percent more water,” said Punjabi, adding that the team will return in April to finish construction. The EWB usually takes two trips a year, and three to four trips overall per project.
The engineers focused on several areas to improve conditions for the villagers. Lucas Johnson, president of EWB and a junior mechanical engineering major, said the population growth put tremendous stress on the existing system. Poor repairs, due to inadequate materials and tools, caused minor leaks to become huge flaws in their water transport, Johnson said.
The Northeastern team created a wider transmission main line, allowing the flow of more water, and chose a higher elevated site for the new storage tank, allowing it to flow more easily with gravity, Punjabi said.
The EWB also tries to make each system sustainable, teaching villagers how the structure works, and methods to repair leaks.
“Part of our project is education,” said Punjabi. “It gives them a sense of ownership with their system, makes them independent.”
Punjabi said the people of El Chaguite were very accepting of the project from the start, but aren’t always very welcoming.
“Many of the villages aren’t as trusting because a lot of groups come in but won’t commit. They’ve had a lot of experiences with broken promises,” Punjabi said.
However, after the water system at Los Planes was complete, the engineers returned, and found the villagers “ecstatic” to see them. The team said it checks on these past projects, confirming the happiness of the villagers with their new water systems, and ensuring the pipes and storage tanks they built are still up to speed.
Johnson said the skills of trained engineers are really valued in these villages, where they don’t have the education or capital to create a system entirely on their own.
“It’s not that they are incapable of doing these things. It’s that
