Help Provide Clean Water to Cyanika, Rwanda.

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