Three years ago I was asked to accompany a group of students to report on their efforts to bring sustainable engineering to a remote village in the Altiplano of the Bolivian Andes. The village, Quesimpuco, was selected in part because of its remote location and the desire by Auburn students to bring its residents a kind of engineering that used primarily local materials, tools and techniques, along with modern engineering concepts. It’s often called ‘appropriate technology.’
The outcome is to develop projects that can be serviced locally, where there is much less of an infrastructure – or to put it more plainly in the language of the students, the lack of a Walmart or Lowe’s across town. Projects that have been developed include an irrigation system that incorporates a large water tank to grow crops in the dry season; hydroponic vegetable planters to increase and extend variety in diets; and residential projects such as an evaporative cooler for refrigeration, a clothes washing machine and a wind power system to provide electricity.
The experience of integrating engineering solutions into a developing community inevitably changes another thing as well: the outlook and world view of our students as they are exposed to cultures at once familiar and foreign to them. In the simplest of terms, the familiarity comes from the fact that people are people, no matter where they are or who they are. The unfamiliar aspects derive from the developing, but changing, economy of the Bolivian Andes, where so much that we take for granted is simply unavailable.
So what changed in the three years since I was in the Altiplano? Starting out, the trip was much longer than the last time, mainly due to transportation. We left Atlanta on time, but there were departure delays in Miami for the seven-hour trip to La Paz, and further delays for the 12-hour ride to Quesimpuco. When we arrived late into the night, a day and a half after leaving Auburn, there was a lot of fatigue in the group. Then 10 long days at more than 12,000 feet took a toll, with oxygen intake at about 62 percent of sea level; some altitude sickness came around as well. It was amazing, though, to see students and faculty bounce back from their physical ailments and move onto the tasks at hand. People got down, but nobody stayed down.
There were some changes in the country that surprised me. In the first, not insignificant, leg of the trip from La Paz to the regional hub of Oruro, the two-lane blacktops had become four good lanes. As we moved into the Altiplano closer to Quesimpuco, there were improvements in the two lane roads. Then we got into the dirt roads that made up the final leg of the trip – not much different from before. Three years ago, there were cell phones around, but seemingly, not so many. In my time away, there seems to have been a cell phone revolution, with a much higher presence, from the ubiquitous advertising on the side of the road to the places that sold phones, whether they were city stores or little booths. The advance of technology: amazing.
Even in Quesimpuco, there were phones, used as much for taking selfies as for talking, of course, and a couple of small (satellite?) dishes on a house or two, and now, in town, a couple of cars and two motorcycles. In short, the technologies we take for granted are now flowing into the most remote of all areas. At the same time, the measured pace and timeless ways of life still persist in this small, agricultural town. The flocks go out to pasture in the morning and return at dusk, shepherded by both men and women. The overall flow of living there seems unchanged. The kids go to school, play in the streets, and don’t really treat us like strangers. Somehow we fit into the tide of the town.
But there are more houses with electricity, too. It’s changing.
Not that the need is not there, perhaps no more apparent than in the irrigation project Auburn’s student engineers have been involved in during the past six years. Quesimpuco is an agrarian community, and the land around it has been farmed since Incan times. Over a period of hundreds of years they developed a system of aqueducts to water their fields, but the mountainous plots still yielded a one-crop economy. By building a storage tank fed by a reliable water source and using a PVC grid, Auburn students were able to demonstrate a more efficient, wider ranging irrigation system that holds promise for additional crops.
This system has been expanded and improved over time, and the Auburn team this year showed how simple in-line valves could be installed to keep pressures within the range of the PVC pipe’s rating, while being easily replaceable with what are essentially homemade components, rather than the commercially available – and expensive – ones that we would typically use. Time and again students were reminded of the ingenuity of the local Quechuans; for instance, when team member Tom Burch, a faculty member in mechanical engineering, ran out of Teflon tape for pipe joints he didn’t think they would be able to continue. One of the local farmers found a plastic bread wrapper and it worked just as well. It was a lesson the students had to pick up on time and again: expect the unexpected, and find something, somewhere, that will work.
Maybe student Michelle Luther, a junior in chemical engineering, said it best: “It has been exhausting but amazing . . . it has been nothing like I have ever experienced – the people are so kind, faithful and generous, the landscape so breathtaking . . . it’s been amazing to do this kind of work in this kind of environment.” Or Alexandra Phillips, a senior in industrial and systems engineering, who said, “We went from getting on a plane with people we knew nothing about, to becoming a team, spending 10 days together –
eating together, sleeping together and working together, and pretty much not having a second of ‘alone’ time at all, to create a kind of dynamic in which we got some real stuff done.”
Auburn will continue to have a presence in the kinds of outreach activities that have characterized our half dozen years working with the Quechuans of Quesimpuco. Now that we have officially partnered with Engineers Without Borders USA, we may extend our reach beyond Bolivia to serve other areas that can benefit from the kinds of hands-on work that is so much a part of the fabric of the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. It’s been said that nothing is so constant as change itself, which we take as a challenge to fit our engineering skills to the needs of those around us, wherever they may be. Bob Karcher, assistant dean for student services, who led the trip this year, is ready for the next challenge, the next adventure. We all are.
