Projects

Honduras

The Honduras project team is working together with the Dominican Sisters of the Presentation in Guaimaca, a town 60 miles northeast of Tegucigalpa that has a population of 15,000 and a regional population of 35,000. The Sisters live in the town and have facilities including a girl’s school (junior-senior high school), a medical clinic, a coffee co-op, and an organic farm. Clean water is an issue in the town and the surrounding barrios and villages. Our first project is to bring clean water to 3 villages just outside the town that only receive well water once every 8 days. The village’s population is 1,500 and the residents are having serious health issues as the only other source of water is a polluted river. Our first assessment trip was in May 2009 and implementation is hoped to begin in late 2009.

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Kenya

EWB – Boston, in partnership with Nuru International, is working on a rainwater catchment project in Southwest Kenya. The goal of the project is to assist our program partner in the design and construction of rainwater catchment devices as part of a larger water and sanitation program. EWB-Boston will develop a prototype which will be installed in March 2010, assessed through the spring rainy season, and implemented in an estimated 400-600 households through the Nuru program.  The design philosophy is to provide additional safe, reliable water sources to compliment the wells, spring boxes, and other drinking water sources that Nuru’s water & sanitation program implements. Existing water sources in the community are grossly inadequate – women and girls have to walk great distances to fetch water, contamination is wide-spread and drought conditions compound the problems. Fortunately, consistent rainfall during the rainy season provides an opportunity for rain harvesting- a desperately needed safe, reliable water source right at home.  For more information on Nuru International, please visit their website:  Nuru International

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Payingdem, India

EWB Boston is no longer working on this project.

Over the past few months, EWB Boston has been in touch with two NGOs in India to better understand the costs and effort involved in this project. We have come to realize that both the cost and time involved have been underestimated and are unsustainable for EWB Boston or for any other EWB chapter. Travelling to the project location is estimated to take at least seven days and cost around $2,500 per person. We negotiated with EWB USA on getting the local NGO to do the majority of the field work with EWB Boston providing technical and financial support. But this model did not fit EWB USA’s model for EWB projects and we reached a consensus that we would officially close out this project. This project highlights the risks involved in any EWB project and we will use the lessons learned when accepting future projects.
 
I would like to thank two of our volunteers, Surjeet Paintal and Carolyn Merrifield, who inherited a dormant project but put in a lot of time and effort in trying to move it forward.