'Blueprint Brigade' Engineers Better Lives

The nonprofit Engineers Without Borders (EWB) has brought clean water and power to hundreds of thousands of people in rural communities all over the world. A 2007 article in Time magazine dubbed EWB the “Blueprint Brigade,” and it's a fitting nickname. Modeled on the well-known Doctors Without Borders, EWB selects projects the world over that require engineering knowledge.

According to the group's website, EWB was founded in 2002 and now has more than 12,000 engineer members. It is working on more than 45 projects in many countries of the developing world. They always partner with local communities, and often student engineers are on hand to get real-world experience. In the United States, EWB has chapters on 180 campuses, and educating the next generation "of socially conscious engineers deeply aware of the needs of the rest of the world" is one of the group's goals.

That goal appears to have been met with Erica Spiritos, an engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who went with the group to Equador's Tingo Pucara community to help provide better access to clean water so the town's children could go to school instead of hauling buckets of water from the other side of their mountain.

"You never know how a community will respond ... but the Tingoans could not have been more excited about the project," Spiritos said in an article on Carnegie Mellon's website. "Kids just 10 years old were picking up paintbrushes and shovels alongside us.... It was incredible to experience their enthusiasm."

"We have explored several ideas, from a wind powered pump to a well drilled at the top of the mountain," said Bradley Hall, another CMU student who worked on the project. "We are in the second year of the project, and ... need more information about soil composition, elevation, and topographical layout, before we can select the best design for their needs."

EWB projects are all funded by the engineers who take them on, so the projects have to be low-cost and easy for the community to keep working.

The Ecuador project was lead by the nearby University of Pittsburgh chapter of EWB.

"We've only just begun," Hall said. "Our involvement in EWB-sponsored projects is underway and growing with the Ecuador project, and we have several goals and ideas for next year."

Photo courtesy of L. Marcio Ramalho, via Flickr