Jing Gong traveled to a rural Guatemalan village as a UCLA student for the third and last time this month, concluding a year-long student group project to improve water access in the area.
Gong, current fourth-year chemical engineering student, is one of four UCLA engineering students who embarked on the trip on June 16 and returned to Los Angeles last week. The students are a part of a group called Engineers Without Borders at UCLA, which aims to build sustainable energy and resources.
The Engineers Without Borders group has sent students to Chocantariy, a village in northwestern Guatemala, to help implement a clean water access program for the past nine years. They traveled to the village along with CasaSito, a local Guatemalan organization in the area.
Students from the group initially designed, prototyped and tested the containers at Sunset Canyon Recreation Center in 2005 and 2006 and have revisited the Guatemalan village for 10 days each year since to build more containers. To date, the student group has constructed 33 rainwater collection systems in Chocantariy.
“We believe that everyone deserves access to clean water, and the (group’s) partnership in Guatemala is helping to make this a reality for all community members in Chocantariy,” said Ashley Templeton Rivas, Engineers Without Borders USA’s volunteer engagement director.
In Chocantariy, several months of each year are spent in a drought because of the arid climate, and residents sometimes must walk to the river a few miles away from the village center each day to bring back water.
Because of its climate, residents have a special need for sustainable water storage systems, said Dasha Gloutak, the group’s former president. Though natural lakes and recesses collect significant amounts of water during the rainy season, they are often long distances away from villages and are prone to contamination, Gloutak said.
The ongoing project involves constructing a series of rainwater collection tanks in front of residents’ homes, which are linked to the gutters to collect and store rainfall.
During their final visit this month, the engineering students tested the quality of the water collection systems installed on previous trips and taught residents about the importance of consuming clean water.
The group also gave presentations about proper sanitation practices and distributed instruction manuals for local residents to build more tanks in the future.
The group’s trips were funded through several sources, including corporate grants and on-campus fundraising, said Niru Senthilkumar, current fourth-year chemical engineering student and president of Engineers Without Borders at UCLA. She added that this is the last year for the project because group members think they have met their goal of providing a sustainable system that can be implemented by families in the area.
To install the tanks on site, the group had to overcome some technical challenges over the years, such as assembling wooden scaffolding in trees to access the tops of the containers, Senthilkumar said. The difficulties faced are similar to those one might encounter as a civil engineer, she added.
“In classes you learn about the applications and (think) that maybe one day you’ll design something new,” she said. “We’re doing that now.”
On the trip, all the tanks at the farms except for one saw significantly lower levels of coliform, a bacteria commonly found in unclean water, since their trip last year, Senthilkumar said. The one tank that did not see a large decrease in coliform was not cleaned thoroughly during the year, Senthilkumar said.
Senthilkumar said the residents told the group that the village saw a decrease in stomach illnesses after the creation of the filtration system for the water collection tanks.
Gloutak said these trips to Guatemala were a way to apply classroom-taught engineering knowledge, such as how to design prototypes and work together in teams, to help provide residents with clean drinking water.
“A lot of engineering work we do is something we don’t get a chance to do in the classrooms,” Gloutak said. “Not only do we get to work on the project, but we get to plan everything from start to finish.”