Engineers Without Borders celebrates 10 years of growing students and communities [PHOTOS]

Never again will Noah Garcia take for granted that he can turn on a faucet and enjoy fresh, clean water.

The 20-year-old senior Engineering major with a Spanish minor has traveled to remote villages in Ecuador and Nicaragua with Fort Lewis College Engineers Without Borders, where he has helped design water systems while serving as a translator between students and villagers — a job that requires him to be “on” from dawn until well after dusk.

It's not easy work. But these experiences, he says, have changed him forever.

“We work in communities where people are living with the absolute bare necessities, people who haven’t lived with readily available water, and from the second we arrive, they pour their hearts and souls into building these systems,” says Garcia.

Being able to actually change the lives of people living completely differently than anyone he has ever known has given him a direction he needed as he prepares for life after college, Garcia explains.

“I think of this program as my saving grace,” he says. “It’s given me a sense of purpose and motivated me to do well in engineering because I’ve seen firsthand the influence engineering can have on people.”

10 years of making an impact

In 2004, Fort Lewis College became one of the first chapters of Engineers Without Borders in the country. Started at the University of Colorado at Boulder just a few years earlier, the nonprofit organization creates “community-driven development programs,” designing and implementing sustainable engineering projects in developing countries all around the world.

Over the decade that FLC Engineers Without Borders has existed, the program has constructed more than two dozen water and sanitation systems in villages that have never known what it is like to have ready access to clean water. The program has also changed and inspired hundreds of students who went along to help.  

Today also known as the FLC student organization Village Aid Project, FLC's Engineers Without Borders chapter's work continues. In May, Laurie Williams, professor of Engineering and co-director of the FLC Engineers Without Borders since 2005, will direct two teams that will work in the Pa'O tribal villages of Pone Phrone and Pone, in north central Myanmar. Meanwhile, two other teams led by Professor of Engineering and Director of FLC Engineers Without Borders Don May will head to Rio Arriba and Las Palmas in remote northern Nicaragua.

It takes a village

May brought his first group of seven engineering students to Huai Houk, Thailand, in 2005. Since then, he has teamed dozens of Fort Lewis College students from a wide range of majors with faculty and community partners to build water and sanitation systems in remote villages throughout Thailand, Laos, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Myanmar, improving the day-to-day lives of thousands of the world’s poorest people. 

“I think there are two things that make this program unique and powerful,” says May. “First is that it is not a contrived homework assignment. Students are solving real-world problems that critically effect people’s lives. The people in these villages are trusting us to help them and relying on the work we do; there is a very high expectation associated with that.

“The second thing is that we give students an opportunity to engage with and understand the world from a different point of view, a different culture. Students could travel or study abroad or do ecotourism, but it isn’t the same thing. This experience is truly unique. Most of the people we serve have never spoken to, or perhaps even seen, Westerners, let alone worked and lived with them to complete an important project.”

Changed for a lifetime

“EWB makes my heart soar,” says Ashley Garcia, a sophomore Sociology major, who has worked as a Spanish translator and built systems. The most poignant part, she says, has been the people involved. “You are always working side by side with the villagers, and it endears you to them. And it’s also really cool to develop amazing friendships with students from all across campus. I have relationships I wouldn’t have been able to build otherwise.”

When she graduates, Garcia is thinking about joining the Peace Corps or working in urban agriculture. “I want to give back to this world, and I realize that I have a lot more to offer than I thought I did. That’s not an easy thing to see as a student. But this program did that for me — it’s been much more than a resume builder.”