Ian Wright

Country: Malawi

Placement: Machinga District Water Office

Focus: Water and Sanitation

My name is Ian Wright, a 3rd year Mechanical Biomedical Engineering co-op student at the University of Alberta. As May rolled around in the spring of 2009, many of my fellow students scrambled to find an engineering firm that would hire them for a four month summer job. They looked for jobs that would enhance their technical skills, their problem solving abilities, and would give them a sense of what the "real world" feels like. While so many students were busy searching for a taste of the engineering world, I was preparing to have a taste of another world altogether - the developing world. I was selected as a Junior Fellow for Engineers Without Borders' short-term overseas placement program. A district called Machinga in Southern Malawi was my destination, and rural water supply was my sector of focus.

When people hear that I spent a summer in Africa with EWB, a common assumption is that I was "building wells." Indeed I did work with some wells, but the lessons I learned that summer go so much deeper than the forty metres that an average borehole is drilled to in Malawi. EWB has developed a waterpoint functionality monitoring system over the last few years and is beginning to scale the system up into more and more districts in Malawi. What does that mean? In short, there are thousands and thousands of taps, shallow wells, and boreholes in Malawi that are broken down. Nobody is fixing these waterpoints, and charities and NGOs continue to build more and more and more. Why is this happening? Waterpoints are being created, then abandoned - the organizations that build these facilities rarely put any thought into the social setting that they are working in. No maintenance or operation systems are established, no financial plan is developed, and nobody owns the waterpoint after the organization's shiny new truck drives away. This needs to change. Until this deeply rooted issue can be tackled, district governments are very interested in gaining comprehensive knowledge of where the waterpoints are, what type of water source they are, who built them, and whether or not they work. EWB's new monitoring system has been designed to retrieve this information on a quarterly basis, in the simplest and most cost-effective way. Several district governments are very excited about the potential impact this new knowledge can have. In helping to implement this system in the Machinga District, I gained invaluable experience in leadership, self initiative, project management, teamwork, written and verbal communication, adaptability, but perhaps most importantly: applying problem solving skills from engineering school to a unique and global setting.

Although the work was both fascinating and rewarding, the strongest connection I felt to Malawi came not from the office, but from the life I lived outside of work. I was lucky enough to live with a Malawian family in a small village for over three months. I ate traditional food, attempted to learn the local language, and absorbed as much Malawian culture as I possibly could in such a short timeframe.

Aside from contributing to EWB's overseas strategy and undergoing immense personal growth, a tremendously important element of the Junior fellowship program is to give back to the University EWB Chapter. I am very excited to share my learnings with the U of A's chapter members, and community members alike. By providing a more direct link to our ultimate beneficiary, the people of Africa, and a fresh perspective on the state of foreign aid today, I hope to enhance the already incredible work that EWB is doing here in Canada.

Check out Ian's blog