A New Year’s Update from Guatemala
At UND, a group of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) students, led by mechanical engineer alum David Robinson, ’70, are working in Guatemala to provide clean water to a village in need. It all started nearly 20 years ago when Dr. Bernard Amadei, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, visited San Pablo, Belize, to access its water supply. It was then he learned that nearly 1,000 Mayan Indians living in the jungle didn’t have clean water and sanitation and, in turn, children in the community were not going to school because their time was being spent collecting water miles away. To learn more about this project, read our article posted back in September of 2019.
On January 2nd, we received an update from UND’s Engineers without Borders team in Guatemala. Here’s the update below:
So far we have hiked into the community and completed some surveys and began testing the water in the three springs. The hike into the community was pretty grueling and difficult but the views from the village were amazing. We left the community for two days to celebrate the new year in San Cristobal with our host family! For New Year’s we ate a traditional Mayan meal and watched fireworks at midnight from the top of the city. Some of the group members attended a New Year’s mass service in the city. Today we are reentering the community and will be there for the next six days to continue our assessment. Everyone is doing well and is healthy!
Look out for the next update on the club’s social media. Here is the link to the clubs Facebook and the Instagram account is “engineerswithoutborders.und”.
