UIC Students, Alumni And Faculty Carry Clean Water To Villages In Guatemala Clean water is easy to come by in Chicago, but in the villages of Cerro Alto and neighboring Labor De Falla in Guatemala, it’s a different story.
Faculty, alumni and students from the University of Illinois at Chicago will return to the region this month to help bring clean water to families and protect their water supply.
“Project Water” is the current phase of a long-term relationship between the two Guatemalan villages and the UIC Chapter of Engineers Without Borders. Those working on the project span several disciplines including public health, engineering and urban planning.
The EWB-UIC team will leave for Cerro Alto in mid May to present a water purification plan to the residents with the hope of correcting the ongoing exposure to disease that the villages are experiencing through water contamination. The plan includes education on water contamination, water samples and contamination mapping, as well as chlorine-based engineering solutions to the problems.
“Project Water” has picked up many supporters over time, largely by word of mouth. One of those supporters is Steven E. Lacey, an assistant professor with the UIC School of Public Health and advisor to the EWB-UIC group.
“Two years ago, I bumped into an undergraduate engineering student that had taken my courses, and when I asked what he was doing for his winter break, he told me about the newly formed EWB group and that they were going to Guatemala that January to work on a school renovation project,” Lacey said. “So I went with the intention of shoveling concrete, which I did plenty of, but when I arrived, I was asked to take point on the ‘Community Health Assessment’ for Cerro Alto.”
On that trip, Lacey and the team conducted a question and answer session with the help of community leaders including a Peace Corps volunteer, a leader of the Women’s Group and the area school director. The goal was to characterize the community, its demographics, and the injury and illness experiences of the village’s people. The health assessment highlighted diarrhea disease, particularly among children, which has directed all of the group’s efforts to date, and has lead to the creation of “Project Water,” according to Lacey.
Last month, more than $4,000 was raised at a Gala to benefit the project. Paul Brandt-Rauf, dean of the UIC SPH, said the project is an important opportunity for students to see their work in action and learn to think about simple engineering solutions to the world’s public health problems. EWB seeks to join mechanical intervention with the human impact, he said.
“The health of the world would be profoundly improved by the simple separation of clean water input streams and dirty water output streams. But it hasn’t happened yet,” he said.
Lacey describes Cerro Alto as lush, rural and mountainous. It is about 50 km outside of Guatemala City, near the town of Chimaltenango with an altitude of around 1600 m. Resources in the region are scarce. Funds raised from April’s Gala will allow EWB-UIC to continue working toward sanitation goals that are sustainable for the community.
Brandt-Rauf said he hoped the efforts of the EWB chapter that began this project will be duplicated in other chapters. He sits on the national board of EWB, an organization of approximately 210 professional and student chapters. Recently, he was a speaker at their national conference in Milwaukee, where the UIC chapter, as well as others around the country, had the opportunity to share their work.
Brandt-Rauf said the UIC chapter is an excellent example of the purpose of the organization to marry public health and engineering, and was originally intended when the idea of public health was first developed in New York City during the Typhoid Mary outbreak.
At that time, the city’s leaders hired an engineer with an understanding of water to find a reason for the spread of the disease, and while water didn’t prove to be the source of that particular problem, it is the source of many others, he said. “Clean water has been the major reason for the tremendous surge in American health after the Civil War, and hopefully will also be the answer for Cerro Alto and Labor De Falla.”
-- Nichola Moretti ^ Top of Page ^
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