Having clean drinking water an arm’s reach away is a luxury in some parts of the world and often taken for granted.
Lauren Hockin, a fourth-year concurrent Civil and Environmental Engineering and Science student, is spending her summer vacation in Malawi, a southeast African country, working as a Junior Fellow with Engineers Without Borders on a water access project. She will be leaving May 15 and returning the end of August.
Lauren Hockin
“I think this is the next step in my learning,” she says. “For me to continue to be effective in what I am doing, I need to see and experience, and try my hand at working on the issues I am trying to raise awareness about in Canada,” she says.
During her stay Hockin will be living with a host family. Pending access to Internet cafes and reliable online access, Hockin plans to blog regularly about her four-month experience and the people she meets. View her blog at https://laurenhockin.wordpress.com/. She also set up a Twitter account and Flickr site, which are linked to the blog.
Hockin is one of five Faculty of Engineering students travelling to Africa this summer to volunteer, some of whom also plan to post updates to a blog or website.
Anne Lombardi will be working in Ghana with Engineers Without Borders. Students in the Civil Engineering and International Development Program, Jessica Barker, David Marmor and Kate Pejman, will be working in partnership with local agencies on civil engineering projects.
Although all the details of her placement have yet to be ironed out, Hockin will likely be helping with water-point monitoring and water-point functionality.
“In Malawi there is a very large problem with water points, which is anywhere you can get clean and safe drinking water functioning. At present, up to 30 per cent, sometimes even higher, of the water access points in Malawi aren’t working,” she says.
The sector is looking to examine ways to ensure the water points are functioning for longer terms and before this can happen, they must work with local governments and other sectors to collect information on where the water points are located and to keep this information at a central location.
“There is not a good catalogue of where the water points are, whether they working, who installed them, and if they are being serviced by area mechanics,” she says.
In preparation for her overseas adventure, Hockin has brushed up on her understanding of international development, local agriculture and culture, and different areas within the water sector.
As part of Engineers Without Borders, she will be partnering with local organizations and communities as someone on the ground helping to problem-solve and devise innovative and unique solutions to providing water to rural Africans.
This is her fourth year being involved in the Western chapter of Engineers Without Borders, but this is the first time Hockin is able to participate in the internship.
Trying her hand at international development, Hockin hopes to learn more about it as a future career. Upon return, she wants to share her experiences with the Faculty of Engineering and explore possibilities for integrating lessons she learned from the fieldwork into the curriculum.
“I think experiencing what it is like to work in an environment that is foreign to you is extremely valuable for when you go into the workplace later,” she says, noting she will need to learn to problem-solve using readily available materials and implement solutions that are culturally sensitive.
“I think most importantly is remembering you are going to help, but you are not necessarily a saviour. I’m going to go and work with an organization that has requested I be there, but there is a huge emphasis on working with them.
“I’m not going over with solutions or plans, or trying to Westernize anything. We are trying to work with them.”