By Ellis Aune | Project Manager
Dear Friends, Alumni, Donors, and Members,
Thank you as always for your amazing and continued support. We can't do it without you! We hope all is well through the winter season.
The spring semester for our program is primarily focused on preparing our team for travel over the summer, which we do by involving all of our members in the design, fundraising, and documentation process. We look forward to finding more funding opportunities, as our trip this summer is expected to cost upwards of $12,000.
We have decided on a team for travel, and we are very excited to have so much interest and involvement in our program. We will be sending three students (four if we can find enough money) and a professional mentor who traveled with us last summer, and they will be traveling for two to three weeks. As we hammer out the details of the summer travel, we are excited to have our travel team get to know each other and our community even better!
The time our travel team will spend in-country will be primarily focused on monitoring and evaluating the previous four implemented systems to ensure they are functioning properly and to be available for any questions or concerns the community might have. We are excited to report that there have been no issues with the most recent implementation, and after the first rainy season, the new system was able to provide several hundred more people with a sustainable source of water through the subsequent dry season. Our community has taken incredible ownership of all of the implementations and has a functioning monetary and collection system in place that allows each system to be financially self-sustaining. Furthermore, our team will assess a fifth site by the name of Kibaya for a planned fifth implementation in the summer of 2018.
In addition to our travel plans, we are proud of our successful and continued partnership with the University Hills Elementary School, where we have just started our third semester of the after school program. Each week, we send several of our members to 1st and 2nd-grade student group to teach an interactive, internationally focused after-school engineering program. Our members all report loving the activities, and the kids have a great time designing and building their own solutions to international engineering problems in an engaging, creative way.
Finally, we always try to keep a strong focus on our own team and cohesion, so that we can ensure everyone benefits and learns from each other. Each week we have a presentation about various aspects of Rwandan culture, and we have had a speaker from the NGO we partner with come and talk more about the work that her organization does in addition to supporting our program. We're excited to continue engaging our members and recruiting more to assist us in our incredible international work.
Thank you again for you continued support, and look for another update as we get closer to summer travel!
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