I feel like the best way for me to assess their needs was to get to know them more and hear from them firsthand. -Cameroon Trip Participant
EWB experiences abroad enable students to experience an alternative culture to their own and communicate with a different community in a way that is unequaled in traditional academia. Through these experiences students have various personal developments including within the vital category of community-based development. As made evident through this study, community-based development is defined as including the understanding the importance of recognizing the ownership the community innately has over the project and seeing the community as a primary project contributor. The ability to transfer knowledge to the community was also identified as a significant component of implementing sustainable designs. Finally, students recognized the importance of having realistic expectations as an element of having community-based projects. This bottom-up approach to development was comprehended by students to be the foundation of sustainable and community-owned projects.
Within this category the following subcategories emerged from student reports: ability to transfer knowledge to community, understanding importance of community ownership, seeing community as a contributor, implementing sustainable design, and having realistic expectations.
Ability to transfer knowledge to community
1. Well, one thing, we couldn’t teach all the families about the educational part because of timing. But we were able to teach the two social workers, Cata and Myra, so hopefully they’ll be able to teach the rest of the community, especially the kids. And I hope that they can see the importance of it. -Guatemala Trip Participant
2. I think that that hopefully will help. You know, by having the first filters in the school and having the teachers involved and the students seeing how it works. They should be able to bring that home. -Guatemala Trip Participant
3. I’m a little bit nervous about the education. I think we’re doing everything great. I think we’re doing a good job, but I do — I think when we’re planning stuff at U of I, it seems a lot more obvious. But I do think we’re bringing in some mixed reactions from the families, and it’s a bit of a concern. I think like with more education, this can be a success, but it definitely is going to be more difficult than I had imagined. -Guatemala Trip Participant
4. I wish we’d had a little more time just to stay there and see them implement more of the filters in the homes, and to see Myra and Cata [local social workers] accompany us just to see the whole process played out. We left just a couple of days before that would have happened. And that would have been really good. And then also, to see them kind of get in the rhythm of doing it, because they’ll be doing it for the next 2 months, and seeing just a good kind of natural flow of things would have been good. -Guatemala Trip Participant
The ability to transfer knowledge was quickly identified as a recurring theme in students during their international EWB experiences. Students on varying projects recognized the importance of creating a strategy to best educate the community on either general or engineering components of the project. Project members expressed contentment that the community would be able to effectively utilize project components after they had educated social workers or teachers, as discussed by quotes 1 and 2, so that these community members could then teach children or other potential project users. However, it was also expressed in quote 3 that transferring knowledge about biosand filters was proven to be a greater challenge than first anticipated, and the student in quote 4 would have liked to make sure that project knowledge was successfully transferred by further evaluation.
Understanding importance of community ownership
5. Just gathering that data in our own minds and understanding them more. Because that is a key component, understanding their needs. And the system is going to be theirs, whatever treatment system. So it’s something they’re going to need to be able to take ownership of. -Guatemala Trip Participant
6. But it is a measure of the community’s, and if the system does fail, it does not necessarily mean that our chapter has failed. It could just mean that the community wasn’t able to hold up their end of the bargain. -Cameroon Trip Participant
7. Participant 1: We may not get the assistance of the people here.
Participant 2: That’s very important. I thought that was very important. -Cameroon Trip Participant
Students on different projects commonly exhibited understanding the importance of transferring ownership of the project to the community. Students recognized this in various capacities while on-site. Some students innately realized this and the consequent importance of fully understanding community needs, as in quote 5, while others recognized the more novice approach to community ownership of simply obtaining community assistance, as quotes 6 and 7 demonstrated.
Seeing community as a contributor
8. I took a lot of confidence away because I felt like we had a lot to offer the community and the construction workers, but I think in the end I just realized the construction workers had a lot to offer us. I mean, watching them and how they did the construction work, I found myself taking tips from that, like, “Oh, that’s a really smart way to do this,” or whatever. And so, I think it was a both ways learning experience. -Guatemala Trip Participant
9. I was really impressed by both the knowledge they had when building the concrete, but also their willingness to work with us to troubleshoot problems. Because every time you start something new you run into problems. And they seemed very willing to take suggestions and to discuss with us what they thought was wrong, what we thought was wrong, and to experiment a little bit to try to find the best solution. So, they seemed very flexible and receptive that way, which was also very good to see, because that’s not always the case. -Guatemala Trip Participant
10. So, I’ve seen that we don’t really know what we’re doing … out there, but some things to them are obviously – those pieces, those doctrines are obviously right … participatory practices, the model the villager uses, the fact that you have to spend some time in the community to get an idea of how to do things properly, I think is obvious to me now. Communities are different enough from one another, that there is no blanket approach. You need to talk about things in terms of community participation and community management. -Guatemala Trip Participant
Students from varying projects explicitly acknowledged the need to recognize the community as a primary contributor to the implementation of the project. Students realized the great contribution that the knowledge and skills of community members could provide a project. It was also acknowledged by students in quotes 8 and 9 that there already might be experts on-site; experts that the team members could learn from and could be utilized to better implement a project. Providing students the opportunity to work alongside community members gives these team members a powerful insight into working in the real world, as seen by the student in quote 10. Recognizing the significance of listening to community suggestions and becoming increasingly receptive to community contributions to a project are invaluable components to a student’s development.
Implementing sustainable designs
11. I would say the true measure of our project’s success would be if we come back in 15 or 20 years, if the project is still working. The problem with so many of these design and development projects in developing countries is that the way that the systems are designed, they’re just not designed to last. And that’s one thing that I know I personally have been talked about from various people time and time again. And that’s one thing that I think will be the true measure of our success, is how long between our design and the community’s maintenance the system continues to provide good water. -Cameroon Trip Participant
12. I was on the construction part and I was really impressed with the way they worked, and they did seem like open to not only suggestions, but working with us and they came up with a good solution on their own, too. So, I’m confident that in the future, from the construction standpoint, they’ll be able to overcome any problems they may face. -Guatemala Trip Participant
13. I don’t know if this is something we didn’t accomplish, but currently the filters are costing a lot more per filter than we had originally anticipated. And getting the second mold is taking longer than we had hoped. And hopefully in the future we will get that soon so we can start increasing the amount of filters that can be built per day. -Guatemala Trip Participant
14. Just like taking it slow and explaining what we were doing, and that it’s a slow process. We had to keep emphasizing that this is something we have to take slow and really make sure we implement something that’s sustainable. That’s hard to communicate. -Cameroon Trip Participant
Sustainable design is the key to effective EWB projects as an implemented design must be able to be continually maintained and utilized by the community in order to be successful. Students greatly recognized this as a vital component to their project implementation. Learning to work alongside the community members was a noted valuable element of sustainability in quote 12. It was also acknowledged that cost was a factor in sustainability by the student in quote 13, as was the necessity to implement a project that many community members would be able to use by the student in quote 11. Finally, understanding the importance of thorough communication as to ensure that the process of implementing a project is successful was realized by a student as vital to the sustainability of the project as detailed in quote 14. Overall students recognized the importance of implementing sustainable, lasting projects.
Having realistic expectations
15. We prepared before we came here a portfolio of what we had done in the previous semester, a lot of which coming back has become irrelevant, which isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s just the nature of the project and the nature of how it works. But I was expecting much more discussion of what we had worked on, presenting options to the community that are no longer relevant. -Cameroon Trip Participant
16. You get the census data, you find out where the populations are, find out how much water they use. You find out how much water you bring. And then, you design a distribution system such that each standpipe has a fair amount of pressure. And you use tanks to control for differences in elevation (hydraulic relay). I feel like I’ve learned a lot about fluid mechanics and designing rural … water systems. -Cameroon Trip Participant
17. We’re coming home with a system, which is far more than I expected. I guess I don’t know what I expected design-wise. I guess just some more survey data and – I don’t know. But coming home with a system is pretty awesome. -Cameroon Trip Participant
Students entered into their travel experiences with varying levels of expectations. Some students, such as in quote 15, expected great amounts of discussion while others, like the student in quote 16, did not expect to need as much technical knowledge as a project ultimately entails. Finally, some students, including in quote 17, actually leave a project with greater outcomes and results than they had initially anticipated. Recognizing that expectations will not often be reality allowed students to have flexibility in their project work and to work with what was given to them.