Engineers Without Borders

General meeting 4/1/09

April 2, 2009 at 7:51 pm | In Meeting Minutes | Comments Off

Announcements:

• The Spring Break trip to El Salvador was successful, Malia and Greg will present today.
• A few students traveled to a very productive international conference in Milwaukee
• The Lela, Kenya project won our vote last term. It is a community of about 5000 people close to lake Victoria in southwestern Kenya. We sent in the application last week, but wont here back for a few more weeks. However, we will get started anyway to get as much of a headstart as possible.

Kenya project meetings will be every Thursday evening at seven.

• We will have elections at the next general meeting.
• April 8^th is college day in the College of forestry, we will have a booth there and are looking for volunteers to man it.
• We will also have a booth for earth day on April 21^st
  

El Salvador trip presentation

• Malia and Greg Kupillas went to El Salvador during Spring Break to assess the rainwater catchment system at the el naranjito school and in cerro caballo, as well as the gravity system at las Mercedes. They also looked at sites future projects.
• The trip was successful overall with no serious problems.

• Extremely fine sand was the culprit for clogging the las Mercedes system. In the future we should sift it out before placing gravel in the collection galleries. Barbed wire has kept animals out of the collection gallery, but not vandals, who have been throwing sand in to clog the pipes. Crabs have also complicated things.
• The existing system (places under ours, so it gets flow priority) will break when shut off, so it has been left on, taking water from the system we built. the verticle flush outs have not been useful, as there is no available water to flush them out with. There is enough flow for the whole community even in the dry season.

• They measured for the next project at lower las Mercedes. There are access problems for lower tank; the pipe would have to pass through properties where people want personal faucets. The previously unknown upper spring only has 5.5min/L of flow, so we will go with the lower spring. The beneficiaries are willing to run a test if we pay for the polyducto to find out exactly where water can make it. They will also figure out where trenches have to be dug.

• FONAES projects and the project built by the El Naranjito community were also assessed. FONAES has recieved more funding and continued their work.

• Filters are getting more expensive and people don’t think they need new ones, so they have been stopping their payments.

Opportunities to get involved in the El Salvador project:

• Las Mercedes gravity system design
• Design for a rainwater catchment system
• Grant writing
• Recipe book as a fundraiser