BlackboardFAMU-FSU EWB Students Helping San Rafael Community
This past summer, in spite of seemingly insurmountable challenges, the FAMU-FSU Engineers Without Borders student chapter successfully sent five students and one adviser to San Rafael, Peru located on a bank of the Peruvian Amazon river, (Figure 1). On this second EWB visit to San Rafael, tasked with improving this small villages' basic infrastructure, the students were briefly stymied by the logistics of getting there. Changing travel dates, personnel changes two weeks prior to leaving, language barriers and slow, barely functional 20HP motorboats, as well as the difficulties associated with transporting several tons of construction materials, were just some of the "speed bumps" faced and overcome by the project travel team.
Primary among the challenges the San Rafael farming village faces daily is access to water and electricity. Past EWB project trips have addressed the village's water access and filtration. This summer EWB focused on a solution to another basic living requirement. Previous health surveys identified the villagers' close contact with human excrement as the cause of the higher than average outbreaks of diarrhea and other pathogen inducing diseases. Sanitary needs taken care of by just a few pit latrines scattered throughout the community are inadequate in number and design. The village soil type is very clayey and does not allow for water to filer out of these pits, thus decreasing the usability of the latrines significantly. Taking the village's geographic and geological situation into consideration and after countless hours of research, our chapter decided to introduce composting latrines to this river community.
The chambers for the composting latrine are kept completely above ground so the soil type does not interfere with the efficacy of this design. When used properly composting latrines provide nutrient rich fertilizer, which normally the community cannot afford to purchase, thus leading to greater crop yield. As most villagers farm for sustenance, having a surplus of crops could provide extra source of income, which can be used to purchase the much-needed chemicals to treat their water. The team was successful in passing on the daily and long-term maintenance requirements of the composting latrine to the appreciative villagers. And now that their community has one finished composting latrine, laborers were hired to finish a second one.
The group looks forward to continuing their work with San Rafael and is looking at a breadth of different possible projects. The most ambitious and needed project that EWB would like to tackle is the construction of a bridge connecting half-dozen families to the main area of the community, (Figure 2). The old bridge was poorly constructed and collapsed during the rainy season an untold number of years ago. Several of the community's authorities mentioned that getting this bridge back up is their number one priority as it is the only land connection to Iquitos, the largest nearby city.
