Help Provide Clean Water to Cyanika, Rwanda.

Dear Friends, Alumni, Donors, and Members,

Thank you as always for your incredible and continued support. We had an incredible summer implementation trip thanks to your support and loyalty, and we truly cannot do it without you!

Our summer implementation trip went splendidly. We had three main goals, the largest of which was to build a fourth rainwater catchment system with three tanks. We came in ahead of schedule and under budget, which is more than we could have hoped. The community with which we work was spectacular, and we are even more confident in our relationship with our Rwandan partners moving forward. We worked for nearly the full five week trip on the construction of the site, ending with a few days to spare and go over the system throughly to check our work. We started by sourcing materials from the local area and transporting wood, sand, gravel, cement, and a whole host of construction tools. We began construction almost immediately and poured foundations for the tanks and columns in the first week. While those were setting, we constructed three trusses out of eucalyptus wood and prepared all of our materials to construct the roof. After the foundations were set, constructino moved quickly and we got a total of six columns built in a week with the assistant of local masons. The masons and other workers on the site all worked quickly to put up the trusses, create crossbeams, install the roof, and finally place and pipe three 10,000 liter tanks over the next several weeks. Both our team and the local community were very happy with the final result!

Our second goal was to add two water tanks to a previous system. One of the three systems a previous team constructed was so effective at collecting water that there was significant overflow that was causing erosion in nearby agricultural areas. Toward the end of our trip we added two tanks and piped them to the existing ones, and we are already getting reports that the tanks are functioning as expected as our community approaches the rainy season. We were very excited to both provide the community with more water storage capability while reducing the negative and unforseen impacts of the initial implementation.

Our final goal for the trip was to select a fifth implementation site, planned for two summers from now. We were able to work with the community to find a location that was very technically feasible for us and met the needs of the local community. The site was selected exclusively by the community vision board members and was approved by the local committees established for many of the smaller communities within Cyanika. We look forward to working with this community next summer when we begin an official assessment, and we are already looking towards improving our design for the coming years.

All four members of our travel team, as well as our professional mentor, had an amazing and very positive experience. We spent a lot of time hanging out with local children and mothers, playing games and having translated conversations when we could. We will be sending another trip of 3-4 students next summer, but until then we can't wait to look at the data we gathered from the trip, focus on our elementary school engineering outreach here in Boulder, and continue to build our team as the semester gets started.

If you would like more information on our travels and more pictures than you could hope for, you can find the blog here: http://ewbrwanda.blogspot.com/

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about our work in Rwanda. Again thank you so much for your continued support, we so appreciate it!

All the best,

Ellis Aune

Links:

• Travel Blog
• CU Boulder Rwanda Webpage

Dear Friends, Alumni, Donors, and Members,

I would first like thank you once again for your incredible and continued support. The work we do to provide clean water to several hundred Rwandan individuals would not be possible with your contributions and loyalty.

The last few months have been a whirlwind as we’ve begun preparing for our upcoming travel! Our designs for our fourth rainwater catchment system were finalized during the last semester after consultation with our professional mentors and the technical team at EWB-National, and we are ready to go with our materials and tools that we’ll be both bringing with us and obtaining while in Rwanda. We’ve spoken to our community to clarify our timeline, and they are ready to start work as soon as we arrive in our community!

There has been a lot of work to prepare for travel on our end, from going over our designs and construction plan one more time, to reviewing surveys we plan to administer to gather feedback on our relationship and quality of work with our community, to holding meetings with Village Makeover, the NGO we partner with. We recently altered our design to be more representative of buildings and structures already standing in the community, so we have transitioned away from steel and concrete and towards wood, gravel, and lava rocks. This has saved us money and allowed us to locally source our materials, so the new plans are more culturally and financially appropriate. All of these preparations have been very exciting and our team can’t wait to head out!

Our travel team leaves on July 7^th, and is comprised of four students and our professional mentor. The first few weeks of travel will be laying the foundation for our newest rainwater catchment system, which will have three 10,000 liter tanks to store water for our community during the rainy season. We will also be adding two tanks to a previous system that can store more water than expected, and at our community’s request we will be expanding that site. The following couple weeks will focus on building the structure itself, including putting up wooden beams to support the roof, allowing the columns to set, and finally putting on a steel roof to catch water. Lastly, we will install the tanks that will preserve water during the rainy season, so that our community can have clean, accessible, and affordable water during the drought conditions of the rest of the year. In total, we will be in Cyanika, Rwanda for five weeks, and we will return to the United States on August 14^th.

During our travel we like to update our family, friends, and supporters with our online blog. We will post pictures and stories every few days when we find internet, and we encourage everyone to follow our travels! This blog also contains updates from all of our past travel if you are interested.

 You can find the blog here: http://ewbrwanda.blogspot.com/

Finally, preparations have begun for this upcoming semester so that we can begin work as soon as our team is back in Boulder for the semester. We look forward to debriefing our trip, reviewing data collected from surveys, discussing this most recent implementation from a technical standpoint, and beginning preparations for our next community that we will be assisting with a rainwater catchment system. We will also continue our cooperation with University Hills, again leading an after-school engineering focused program for 1^st and 2^nd graders. This partnership was a huge success in the spring and we are so excited to continue our interactive exploration of global cultures and engineering challenges with these fantastic kids!

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments about our work in Rwanda. Again thank you so much for your continued support, we so appreciate it!

All the best,

Ellis

Links:

• Rwanda Travel Blog
• EWB-CU Rwanda Page