WPI team finds solutions in central Guatemala; Drinking water system devised.

PositionBUSINESS MATTERS

Byline: Michael Puttre

Indoor plumbing is one of the marvels of the modern world, but it is missing in many of the world's rural corners.

One of those remote communities, in central Guatemala, has plenty of clean drinking water - during the rainy season. In the height of the dry season, the 280 or so largely Mayan residents of the village of Guachthu'uq have to carry water, on foot, from the base of the mountain, day after day, until the autumn rains return.

A group of five engineering students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, accompanied by a professor and a professional engineer serving as mentors, spent 12 days this month showing this remote community how to keep fresh water on hand year-round.

The team represented the WPI student chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA, a nonprofit organization founded at in 2002 with the mission of pairing teams of volunteer engineering students and mentors with communities in developing countries to solve fundamental health and quality-of-life problems. Since 2008, the WPI chapter has been working with Guachthu'uq, in the Verapaz region of Guatemala.

"The rainy season gives them more water than they could possibly use, and the dry season provides barely any," said student Christopher Sontag, a junior studying electrical and computer engineering. "The problem is giving them water for the whole year."

Guachthu'uq is a collection of about 40 homes, most of which are rudimentary one-room dwellings with corrugated tin roofs. The community is essentially off the grid in terms of plumbing, electricity and other infrastructure.

"Up on the mountain and in Guachthu'uq, there were challenges at every turn," said Alexandra Vresilovic, a senior studying civil and environmental engineering. The trek up to the community from San Cristobal, where the team stayed with local families, was an arduous 45 minutes on foot.

"Even though I was struggling with my little backpack, there were women older than 70 and children younger than 8 walking with water, food or firewood," she said.

The water source, however, is polluted with runoff, sewage and contaminates from local industry, including a tannery, according to Creighton Peet, Adjunct Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary and Global studies and a faculty advisor for the WPI chapter of Engineers Without Borders. Many of the village's adult men are away from home, he said, working at jobs to earn money.

Initially, the WPI team wanted to devise a centralized rain...

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