Engineering in Huamanzana

Cell phones are fairly common throughout the country, but the villagers were unable to use them until the University’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders began a solar energy project that, in addition to providing electricity, allowed villagers to charge their phones. EWB is a non-profit organization that works with developing communities to build sustainable engineering projects. The Princeton chapter’s projects in Huamanzana have been related to community bathroom facilities, solar-powered electricity and efficient water distribution.

When EWB-Princeton began in fall 2004, Huamanzana was the first location students visited. Since then, the University has sent one EWB team to Huamanzana for four weeks every August. The students live in sleeping bags on the floor of the schoolhouse, eat with a different local family every day and help the village realize its potential for self-sufficiency.

Every proposal for community improvement has come from the residents, who communicate their needs to EWB members, said Barbara Hendrick ’12, the current project manager for Peru.

“The point of EWB is that you’re working with the community, not just for it ... It’s really a partnership,” she explained.

This summer, former project manager Hank Song ’11, Hendrick and a group of three other EWB members traveled to Huamanzana to ensure the maintenance of their former projects and begin the “sustainability” phase of their mission.

“The focus on this trip was community empowerment,” Song said. “Any aid organization wants to get the community to sustainably support themselves, to take ownership of the project and maintain it. That is the only way to ensure that the project is sustainable and successful.”

According to Song, many nongovernmental organizations go to indigenous communities, install high-scale systems, and leave. “It’s great for a year or two, and then it breaks down and the [people] don’t know what to do with it,” he said.

To ensure the sustainability of the infrastructure built by EWB-Princeton in past years, the five-person team tackled several tasks this summer. They formed a water committee to enforce water conservation, ran workshops to teach the villagers how to fix leaks and showed community members how the water distribution system works.

The students also ran one-hour workshops for children during school hours, where they taught all 40 children at once. “We taught them about bacteria, hand washing techniques, dental hygiene, a little bit about the water system,” Song said.

But residents, used to receiving more concrete forms of aid, were skeptical. “The toughest thing about community education is that there is nothing tangible for them to see,” Hendrick explained. “We told them, ‘We’re going to have lessons and meetings,’ and they [wondered aloud], ‘OK, what else are you giving me?’ The biggest challenge was persuading people that we were providing a service and not just living off their food for a month.”

A steady number of residents attended the EWB-run workshops on water system maintenance, and some were nominated for positions on a governing body called the “water committee.” Nominees accepted their appointments enthusiastically, Hendrick said, going along on system walkthroughs and taking notes on all the tasks the students left for them.

Though villagers can gain much from EWB-Princeton’s work in Huamanzana, the experience has been life-changing for Princeton students as well.

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“It’s very much an organization that gives people holistic perspective on what it means to be involved in international development, not just [the] engineering aspect, but social, cultural, anthropological [and] economic,” said Jane Yang ’11, co-president of EWB-Princeton.

“Sure, I built chimneys, taught school lessons and repaired faucets,” Nicole Businelli ’13, who traveled to Peru with EWB this summer, said in an e-mail. “But even more rewarding were the friendships I made ... I’ll never forget the conversations I had while sitting on piles of Peruvian potatoes on a rickety camion or the meals I shared with the generous families who cared for us.”

Shannon Brink ’09, former co-president of EWB-Princeton, went to Huamanzana six times throughout her Princeton career and said that EWB motivated her to return to Peru after graduation. She now works for the United States Agency for International Development on its poverty reduction and alleviation project.

“Facing the challenges of working with poor communities, learning about project management, programming scarce resources — all of those factors influenced by decisions about my career choices and my studies at Princeton,” she said.

Brink travels around Peru visiting small businesses, farmers and native communities, screening potential candidates for USAID assistance and evaluating USAID programs. She credited EWB for her comfort in interacting with rural and isolated communities.

“I understand how to relate to people who see foreigners come in and want to know how they will benefit or who have been disillusioned as a result of bad experiences with foreign donors in the past,” she said.

Yang, Song and co-president Mohit Agrawal ’11 all said they are looking to work in international development in some capacity and that their decisions were influenced by their involvement with EWB.

“International aid experience is something you really can’t get in the classroom,” Song explained. “It adds a global perspective to everything you do.”

In addition to coming away from his experience with vocational direction, Song also has a new cultural perspective.

“The people are very, very genuine,” he said. “Though they live in very different conditions [than] we do, they’re also very happy. Just the fact that people [can be] happy without the things we take for granted made me realize that we don’t need all the things we think we need to be happy.”

Hendrick also observed this attitude among Huamanzana’s residents.

“They have a different mindset. When they don’t have something, they don’t complain about it — they just roll with it,” she said.

Both Song and Hendrick are determined to go back to Huamanzana, without EWB-Princeton, to visit the adults and children whom they now consider family.

For Brink, the ties to the town run even deeper. In 2007, she and a co-founder of EWB-Princeton were named godparents of a boy from Huamanzana.

“His parents wanted us to be godparents because they knew we recognized value of education,” said Brink, who was also named the godmother of another child in the village. “Having two foreigners who valued education [as their child’s godparents] was seen as a very big honor for them.”

For her, going back to Huamanzana is no question.

“I’ve remained close with two or three families,” she said. “I know that the next time I’ll be back there I’ll have several invitations for lunch and dinner.”