By Tom Rutkowski (MCivEngr’03)

“Hey Tom, you’re an engineer. Come over and talk to this lady. She wants to bring clean water to a village in Madagascar,” my friend Steph Cohen Stoddard (EnvCon’96) said as I ambled down the Pearl Street Mall. She was speaking with Fanja Rakotonirina, a Malagasy woman selling gorgeous raffia hats out of a white tent. I stopped to speak with Fanja and within a couple of months, had started, with the help of a Boulder group called Hope for Madagascar, an Engineers without Borders (EWB) project to bring clean water to the village of Ambalona, Madagascar.

Almost two years later, I found myself bumping along a Malagasy highway on the way to Ambalona. My travel partner, Ryan Tolene (Geol’04), and I had been traveling for four days and were exhausted. Throw in some jet lag, a very foreign culture, police checkpoints in the dark and a seemingly endless, windy, pothole-ridden drive to the village and I wasn’t quite certain we would ever make it to our project. Fear, anxiety and excitement were riding shotgun with us.

I struck up a conversation with Fidi, our translator, who learned English while spending a couple of months in the Midwest learning to cultivate orchids. “The U.S. was nice,” he said, “but this place is paradise!” Paradise…hmm…that’s not the word I would have chosen to describe what I had seen so far, but who was I to judge?

Our week in the village turned out to involve the most satisfying and challenging work I have ever done. Interacting with locals, managing drillers and doing basic engineering in a tiny village halfway around the world was intense and fulfilling. By the last day, I was totally exhausted and the school teacher gathered his class around one of the wells and all the students sang a tribute song to EWB. I cried.

Everything about EWB has CU connections

The organization was founded by Bernard Amadei, a CU engineering professor, in 2001. When I was an environmental engineering graduate student, finding a seat at student EWB meetings was hard.

I worked on a CU-EWB water supply project in Peru and then spent a semester studying waste water irrigation in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal with the help of a Benjamin Brown grant. During those four months, I found myself interviewing farmers, getting lost on ancient paths through countless rice paddies and taking water quality samples next to smoking funeral pyres. My EWB and Nepal experiences were highlights of my graduate studies at CU. Upon graduation, I was determined to stay involved with international projects.

Many of my CU classmates were involved with projects all over the world. Since the organization was founded, EWB has spawned student and professional chapters around the globe and some universities, including CU, have introduced developing-world engineering classes and programs.

Taking a close look at local groundwater

The primary goal of our December 2009 trip in Madagascar was to conduct an investigation of the quantity and quality of local groundwater. We also wanted to survey potential surface water resources and finalize a memorandum of understanding with the village. The groundwater investigation included drilling two test wells, conducting hydraulic testing and collecting water quality samples. The goals for our trip were based on data collected during a 2008 assessment trip conducted by two of my colleagues at Golder Associates, Adam Hobson (MCivEngr’04) and Eric Blumenstein.

Our entourage was quite large and included nine drillers, one translator, one community development specialist, two drivers and three cooks. The drillers arrived in the village by taxi, with all their equipment and supplies tied to the roof.

Six hundred people live in Ambalona. The village has no electricity and subsistence agriculture is the primary economy. One of the first things I noticed was that village life revolves around rice. Lush green rice paddies surround the village, crammed into every corner of the landscape. Women are busy transplanting rice, drying rice on mats in the middle of the village and pounding rice for rice meal. Villagers eat rice three times a day and a favorite drink is water cooked in the big rice pot after the rice is done. I slowly got used to the drink, which tasted like burnt rice. The villagers promised me that it aided digestion. Ryan was surprised to find out that rice production is done completely by hand when he found a pebble in his plate of rice.

Most villagers have little money and some suffer from starvation. Our translator was visibly disturbed when he pointed out mothers harvesting a large tree whose fruit is barely edible and only eaten by those who can’t afford food. It was depressing to see children with distended bellies, another indicator of poor nutrition. I had never spent this much time in a village where people were starving and it was different than I expected.

It was a far cry from the dramatic portrayal of starvation in Africa I was used to seeing on the cover of Time or Newsweek, where you assume that a village is thrown into chaos from starvation. No, this was different. Some villagers had enough to eat and some villagers did not and this just appeared to be a fact of life. It was almost like comparing yourself to the Jones’ down the street who might just happen to live in a smaller house, which is also just a fact of life. It was also different because the villagers were generally quick to smile, always curious as to what we were doing and always a laughing heartily at our Malagasy phrases.

Water contamination but water needed

Villagers collect water from a nearby river, which is contaminated with fecal bacteria due to human and animal contamination. Women and girls are responsible for collecting water and they were instrumental to our project, even though I didn’t realize it when we arrived. At least three times a day they spend up to an hour walking down to the river and hauling water back to the village for cooking. All the time spent collecting water prevents girls from attending school. Even simple contact with the river water can be hazardous as the local snails carry the disease schistosiamiasis.

One big issue when we arrived was there was no water to help the drillers begin to drill the well. And we needed at least 250 gallons to drill each well. We said this to the village chief, but the next morning there was no water. Things were looking grim. We called another meeting with the chief and explained once again why the drillers needed water to begin drilling.

Although I felt frustrated the next morning, I spied three women coming through woods carrying water jugs on their heads. Chatting and laughing, they dumped the water at the drill site and headed back to the river for more. An old man from the water committee showed up and began taking attendance. Unknown to us, the villagers had met the night before and the women had agreed to bring water.

A steady stream of women and girls kept coming that morning, lugging water to our site so that one day, their walk to water would be as easy as walking over to the village well. It was a beautiful sight to behold.

On or around our third day in the village, I caught glimpses of Fidi’s paradise. My morning commute consisted of a five minute stroll to a drill site. For our midmorning snack, the village boys would arrive with a bundle of delicious leche fruit. During lunch, we would get a sneak preview of dinner, usually a scrawny chicken or duck strutting around the kitchen tent. No matter what time of day, there was always a boisterous crowd of children following us around, trying out a handful of English phrases.

Hard work in the village

Why was EWB founded at CU? How did I meet up with Fanja on the Pearl Street Mall? The CU community, faculty and staff are constantly looking for new opportunities and are willing to dream big. Bernard Amadei started the first EWB project by chatting up his Guatemalan gardener who described a village in need. When I met Fanja on the Pearl Street Mall, I knew what EWB could accomplish and I jumped at the opportunity to start a project halfway around the world. And CU grads like Ryan Tolene and Adam Hobson are helping to make the project a success.

In the village, Ryan logged 14-hour days, often completing field logs and running pump tests in the dark. He said he was taking the EWB work more seriously than his professional career because of the impact he was having and the epic journey we had taken to get to it.

We completed installation of two wells during our week in the village. The water quality and quantity of one well was promising and we hoped to have a hand pump installed soon. The other well was contaminated with fecal bacteria and we are currently considering possible remediation alternatives.

In a dramatic ceremony with the entire village, most of who were crowded in a single classroom, we signed a memorandum of understanding which outlines a five-year partnership between the village, Hope for Madagascar and EWB. We are currently planning our next trip and can use all the support we can get.

Tom is a senior project engineer at Golder Associates in Lakewood, Colo. He lives in Boulder with his wife, Tori Peglar (MJour’00), director of CU-Boulder alumni communications, and their two very lively girls, Skylar and Jordan.

More about Engineers without Borders

Many CU students and alumni are involved in professional EWB chapters. The national EWB-USA headquarters is in Boulder. Dubbed the “Blueprint Brigade” by Time magazine, EWB-USA grew from a handful of members in 2002 to over 12,000 today. EWB-USA has over 350 projects in about 45 developing countries around the world including water, renewable energy, sanitation and other projects.

Interested in writing a CU Voices personal essay like this one? Contact Marc Killinger at 303-492-2280 or 800-492-7743.