Post #1
The humid air of the bridge between plane and airport confirmed that I wasn’t imagining things. Reality became more vivid with each leg of the journey – a car ride through a Managua in the evening, then the next day along a cobblestone highway to the village of Silvio Mayorga in Nicaragua.
Until recently, my work with Engineers Without Borders had taken place in a classroom. That week, however, our work began in earnest with a trip to our project site to assess the community’s situation. Our focus since choosing Silvio Mayorga as our partner community had been clean water access. Upon arriving, we found that the situation was better than we expected.
The community is spread along the highway, with the church at its center. Next to the church is a large communal well, the deepest of many in the town. Though the well had originally been capped, making it unusable, members of the community organized to install a pump, tank, and rudimentary distribution system. As a result, many now have access to clean water, without the high calcium levels present in most, if not all, of the community’s other wells.
This system, however, is not without significant drawbacks. The structure that supports the tank is unstable, preventing it from being filled fully by the pump without the tower collapsing. The tower’s height is also insufficient to propel water throughout the distribution system. That system does not reach every house, mainly due to lack of resources on the part of individual families.
To understand all of this better, our four-person travel team worked to interview each household in the community. This was one of the key components of our trip, allowing us to adapt our project design specifically to the community’s needs. This trip was my first real chance to practice speaking Spanish, and it was stressful, since the success of our surveys relied on mutual understanding between American interviewer and Nicaraguan interviewee. Initially, it seemed impossible. The first few interviews were rocky, with many questions and answers misunderstood. What it took to make it work was teamwork and patience. We relied on each other to fill in the blanks. When my knowledge faltered, one of my teammates would pick up the thread of the conversation.
Through these surveys, I was able to meet many of the families that this project will help. We are serving a community with our work, but it’s easy to forget that when we work on it from afar. This community is made up of real people, with individual lives and concerns. Our trip transformed my understanding of the project. It’s not simply details about water quality and designs for pumps and tank, but instead an endeavor that has the ability to change lives and livelihoods.