Engineers Without Borders - USA

Our planning for our future work in the community continues as we work to quantify the severity of rainy season flooding and it's disruptions to work and school attendance as well as quality of life in the community. Once the impact can be fully quantified, we will begin to gather topographic information and plan the storm water improvements. This project has the potential to be a huge return on a small investment; with minimal improvements to the existing ditches we may be realize great relief from the standing water the community currently suffers with in the rainy season. Inexpensive and easy to inspect and maintain, an improved ditch network could eliminate standing water that breeds insects that carry disease and frustrates proper sewage disposal as well as basic hygiene.

We also continue the work to ensure that the prior work in the community is successful long term by inspecting the financial and maintenance operations of the local water board (junta de agua). As correction to their operations is needed we will work with the community to make sure that they make the necessary maintenance and financial changes to their operations to ensure that the potable water system we designed and helped them to construct in our prior phases of work continues to function as designed for many years. We also endeavor to train up leaders in this community so that long after our team's involvement is at an end the water system will be sustainable and continue to serve the community without the need for outside resources.

Your donations to our cause will allow us to continue the needed data collection and monitoring of the community.  

Our travel team will be leaving Sunday April 29, 2012 to install rain water collection system consisting of piping, two large rain water collection tanks, and biosand filtration.

We have been working with our in country contacts these past few weeks to secure materials, tools, and delivery of both to our project site.

Along with our installation efforts we will be completing some water quality and community health assessments to use as a baseline to monitor improvements in both of these areas as a result of the new collection system and biosand filters.

Thank you for your continued support. We look forward to updating all of you with details from a successful trip.

Currently, the Peace Corps team has been pulled out of Homduras because of political instability in Honduras. We are still going on with the project. We have almost reached the completion of pipeline design. next we will be forming a new point of contact in Honduras, to support the communicaions between teh local government and the our EWB team here in United States. Once our design is complete, which will be very soon, and we form a new point of contact, we will discuss with the Honduran team and figure out how to secure the funding for construction.

Thanks for your support so far!