UMaine Engineering Students Spending Spring Break Assessing Honduran Village Water Problems

Contact: Jean MacRae, 581-2137
George Manlove, 581-3756

ORONO — Last year, civil engineering undergraduates Heather Martin and Lee Rand joined a group of other UMaine students visiting a small, poverty-stricken community in Honduras over spring break as part of a Spanish language service-learning class.

While some in the group led by Spanish professor Kathleen March worked with orphanages, handed out toothbrushes and toothpaste in schools, volunteered in nursing homes and health clinics, the engineering students looked at water and sanitation problems in the tiny village of Dulce Vivir, part of the community of Dulce Nombre in western Honduras.

“Seeing how most of the people lived, the water they drank, the food they got — even the houses they lived in — was a massive shock,” Rand recalls. “They had a massive disease problem stemming from insufficient outhouses.”

Since then, Martin and Rand helped establish a UMaine chapter of Engineers Without Borders and have embarked on a three-year project to see how engineering students at UMaine can help with water and sanitation improvements in Dulce Vivir and Dulce Nombre.

Today, 13 UMaine students, including three future engineers, left for two weeks in the city of Santa Rosa de Copan and nearby Dulce Nombre to continue for a fifth year spring break volunteer work in the area.

Mike Parker, a sophomore mechanical engineering student from Bradford, Maine, says the group from the College of Engineering will begin an assessment of the water problems and see what might be done to improve water quality and sanitation.

Large-scale infrastructure changes are unlikely, says Parker, because the residents might not have the resources to maintain and operate, let alone pay for, such a system. “If they would have the capacity to handle something like that and we would have the resources, that would be an option,” he says. “Probably we’ll be looking at smaller-scale options.”

In addition to Parker, engineering students Brandon Newman and Elizabeth Zelnic and biology and philosophy major Kelly McGuirl are joining March, who is leading her fifth student visit to the Dulce Nombre area.

The people of Dulce Nombre have welcomed the UMaine students to follow up on preliminary work done last year, according to March, who first established a relationship with the people of Dulce Nombre five years ago.

“It’s a country that has so much need. Honduras is the second poorest country in Latin America, after Haiti,” March says. “In all of Honduras you cannot drink the water. Everybody in the Dulce Vivir community has dengue fever because of the mosquitoes and the pools of water and the waste situation.”

Jean MacRae, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and faculty adviser to the UMaine chapter of Engineers Without Borders (UM-EWB), says the project is a good opportunity for UMaine students to put their skills to work.

“I think that what UM-EWB does is to offer an opportunity for a transformative experience where students and the rest of us get to see what is really going on in the world,” she says.

Adds Charles Friedman, a civil engineering student and a cofounder of UM-EWB, “We think that there is a huge potential at UMaine for engineering students to work on service projects and make an impact in the world and locally. Sustainability is a big topic that is going to be big in the future, and Engineers Without Borders is a way for that to happen and I am really excited about the future of that.”

UM-EWB is collaborating with UMaine’s Central America Service Association (CASA) for the trip. Under March’s leadership, CASA has been participating in service projects in the community since 2004, including supporting the construction and development of a library and a healthcare clinic. In the process, CASA has built relationships that are vital to the success of each trip.

March, the faculty adviser of CASA, is accompanying students majoring in Spanish, nursing, international affairs, in addition to engineering. An engineering mentor, Robert Sypitkowski of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection who has worked on water-supply and sanitation projects in Indonesia and Sudan, also will participate.

The 13 UMaine students comprise an interdisciplinary and collaborative group. Nursing students will provide medical expertise, engineering students will provide engineering skills, while the Spanish language students will provide the communication bridge between the students and the community. The students will work on their own projects in the community while collaborating with each other as needed, according to March.

Expenses for the engineering students are being augmented by donations from UMaine Student Government, the College of Engineering, Nancy Morse Dysart Travel Support Program and several private donors. CASA has been raising funds and collecting educational materials and books, clothing, medical and dental supplies for the trip for several months. The UMaine Bookstore also has contributed books for the students to take to Honduras.