Attn. Reporters: You are invited to attend an EWB presentation about the trip on Friday Sept. 12 at 3 p.m. in room 320 of the Environmental Technology Building. For directions: http://hcgs.unh.edu/ETBParkingLot.html.

DURHAM, N.H. – University of New Hampshire (UNH) engineering students traveled to Thailand this spring to provide a small, mountain village with clean drinking water and wastewater treatment, dramatically improving the health of its residents. 

“The project reached out to me in a way that nothing has ever before,” said Erin Stanisewski, a graduate student who participated and has since received her degree. “I feel changed, smarter and like a better person for doing what I did.”

Stanisewski and seven others -- Deana Aulisio, Jodie Bray, Lauren Dage, Jeff Garnett, Christian Kastrup, Seth Soos and Mindy Weimer, all graduate or undergraduate students of civil engineering -- were part of the newly formed UNH chapter of Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB).

Established in 2000, the non-profit group’s mission is to help developing areas worldwide with their engineering needs, “while involving and training a new kind of internationally responsible engineering student.” Working under the supervision of volunteer faculty and professional engineers, students gain real-world experience designing and building engineering projects for water, wastewater, energy, sanitation and shelter. The projects are initiated by, and completed with, contributions from the host community, which is trained to operate the systems without external assistance. In this way, EWB tries to make its projects appropriate and self-sustaining.

Weimer organized the UNH chapter in less than six months, after first learning of EWB from her advisor, Kevin Gardner, associate professor of civil engineering. About 50 students came to the first meeting and the group raised the $10,000 needed for the trip with a substantial donation from the student activities fund as well as private donations.

“It just took off because of all the people who wanted to be part of it and help out,” said the former graduate student in the Environmental Engineering program. “Before we knew it, we had a project. We didn’t finish fundraising until a week before we left.”

The UNH chapter of EWB left the United States on May 11, despite tensions caused by the invasion of Iraq and a raging SARS epidemic in Southeast Asia. After two days of travel, they arrived in Santisuk, a village in northern Thailand inhabited by the Lahu people, a formerly nomadic “hill tribe” only recently forced to settle down by a lack of game and forestland. Clean water in the village was rationed and non-potable water for washing and bathing was piped from a river, which some residents drank at risk to their health. At times, wastewater ditches overflowed into rivers affecting villages downstream.

Over the course of five days, one team of students and villagers excavated, lined and covered the hillside spring that supplied the villager’s water to prevent contamination. They also installed filters to eliminate bacteria and viruses, as well as a storage tank sufficient to supply the village of 150. A second team tackled the village’s septic system. They installed two leach fields made from slotted PVC pipe. As a result of their work, the villagers, 40 percent of whom had suffered frequent intestinal problems caused by contaminated drinking water, are significantly healthier.

“When it was time to leave, the villagers all reached into the bus to thank us and shake our hands. That was really cool and sad and happy,” Aulisio wrote in a journal she kept of the group’s experiences. “It was amazing to have worked with them to do this project. It made me feel so close with them all. I have never felt so fulfilled. What an incredible feeling – to help people with such a necessary, simple thing, water.”

During spring break, EWB-UNH hopes to send students to Santa Rita, Peru to help complete another project. The village of 250 suffered heavy flooding as a result of the strong El Nino of 1998. EWB plans to install a waste water collection and treatment system for the village, which currently uses unsanitary latrines.

On the Web: www.unh.edu/ewb, www.ewb-usa.org

PHOTO CAPTIONS

Dig It: UNH Students and Lahu villagers dig one of Santisuk’s new leach fields.

Pipe Dreams: Seth Soos and Lauren Dage cut a slotted PVC pipe to be installed in one of Santisuk’s new leach fields.

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