Under the Needle: Engineers Without Borders building better lives

The goat was a problem. It's not that Susan Bolton didn't appreciate the gift. But she didn't want to eat it and she couldn't take it on the plane.

Working with a team of engineering students, Bolton, 54, had been in Yanayo, Bolivia, at better than 8,200 feet elevation for four weeks redesigning cooking stoves, building roofs with chimneys and assembling an impromptu irrigation project.

She was tired. She wanted to be home yesterday. But first there was the matter of the goat and other gifts from the grateful villagers.

"It just went on and on," Bolton said, laughing. "I was ready to go. I was really ready to go. We couldn't take all of the stuff with us, and we needed to do something culturally sensitive to refuse.

"Next time, we need to get a goat expert to go with us."

The good thing is there will be a next time. For the past three years, Bolton has been the primary faculty member for the University of Washington's student chapter of Engineers Without Borders while she doubled up with a professional membership in the same nonprofit.

It has been eight years since Bernard Amadei, a civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado, founded EWB. The group claims 10,000 members nationally, from civil engineers to microbiologists to hydrologists.

Broadly, the group's goal is to improve public health through engineering by creating systems for filtering water -- clean water is a major international issue -- irrigating farms and handling sewage, among other things. Privately, members joke, EWB's true purpose is to improve living conditions enough to dent the need for Doctors Without Borders.

In a way, this is the tacit, long-term goal of most do-gooder groups, Bolton said: Have enough success to kill the necessity for the group.

Bolton originally didn't want to be an engineer. Living in Colorado Springs, Colo., and nearing a doctorate in biology, she took a look at the job market -- "There was none" -- then switched to civil engineering. After teaching a year at New Mexico State, she moved to Seattle in 1992 and began teaching at the University of Washington in the engineering and forestry departments.

Bolton first heard of EWB when it first arrived on campus in 2005 -- a group of students who started a loosely constructed chapter. When she saw what they wanted to do, she said, "I thought, 'Ah, I have some of those skills. And I'd like to use them in a humanitarian way.' "

In Yanayo, this partly meant developing better stoves and chimneys for the high-altitude village where many of the 100 residents contracted lung disease from poorly vented interior stoves and thatch roofs.

After a reconnaissance mission to figure out the engineering problem -- creating cheap, locally available stoves and chimney-safe roofs -- her team returned for four weeks to complete the job and train residents.

Unlike some groups, the engineers return to their projects to find out how they're working and make repairs or improvements. In some cases, they'll complete projects abandoned by another organizations. Bolton's headed back to Yanayo in July.

When her group got to Yanayo, they found a water tank built to store rainwater -- but no conveyance system. "You see this stuff all of the time," she said.

So the students, already pressed for time on the other project, cobbled together a working irrigation system to move the water to the fields.

From an engineering standpoint, everything is a compromise, Bolton said. At any given site, from Rwanda to Guatemala to Suriname, engineers must become clever to build something that can be duplicated and maintained locally.

"It's not like we can go to Home Depot," she said.

The design and building process isn't easy on engineering students and professionals more comfortable with computer-assisted design than corrugated tin. "Kids these days can't ever fix things because they don't buy anything they can fix," she said.

This week, the Seattle chapter of Engineers Without Borders is hosting 700 members for the group's international conference (ewb-usa.org) at the University of Washington.

The region, global health experts say, is posed to become a leader in global health issues with the newly founded Department of Global Health at the UW, the parallel focus of the Gates Foundation, rapidly growing chapters of EWB at the UW and Seattle University and a considerable stock of engineers in the local population.

And maybe in time, EWB will begin to give those borderless docs a run for their money.