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CUE 2006

Team members John Jannetto, Kiran Vinta, Niko Kalinic, Ron Garan, Evan Thomas, and Jean Pierre Habanabakize, a Rwandan engineering student, install solar panels on the roof of the Mugonero Hospital.

EWB-USA Stewards Sustainable Development in Rwanda

by Evan Thomas

After being broken in a landslide years ago and healing without medical treatment, the farmer's femur, arm, and wrist were badly misaligned. Now, visiting orthopedic surgeons were helping the resident doctor in Mugonero, Rwanda to re-break and re-set the bones correctly. Suddenly, the power failed and the surgery lights went dark, plunging the operating room into equatorial darkness.

Instead of suspending the surgery while nurses fumbled to light emergency kerosene lamps, the surgeons reached above their heads and pulled two switch chains, flooding the rooms with light. Solar panels and batteries installed only a few days earlier by Engineers Without Borders-USA allowed the surgery to continue uninterrupted.

It was a rewarding day for the EWB-USA team, which included six CU-Boulder engineering students and two volunteers from NASA Johnson Space Center. The team had traveled to two Congo border communities in January 2006 to implement a coordinated array of projects aimed at developing healthy communities. It was the organization's sixth visit to Rwanda since 2004.

The EWB-USA team partnered with Muramba College, a boarding high school for 600 girls, to conduct water quality testing in the region, review hygiene standards, evaluate the health and lifestyle of the community, and educate the residents about the potentially life-saving, sustainable technologies installed on previous visits. These included rainwater catchment systems providing over half a million liters of water throughout the year, a restarted sand filter, and additional solar-powered lighting.

The lights installed in the Mugonero Hospital operating room were part of a larger system providing lighting for the surgery prep room, two nursing stations, the delivery room, and hallways leading to patient rooms. Three 102-watt solar panels and ten 50 amp-hour batteries were supplied through donations to EWB-USA. The total cost of the January projects, including travel expenses, was only $35,000.

The team plans to return in June to provide reliable sources of drinking water for Mugonero and Muramba through a stand-alone, solar-powered UV water sanitizer with pre-filters currently in development. EWB-USA is also developing a partnership with the Kigali Science and Technology University to install biogas reactors in both communities to take human and animal waste and capture methane produced in decomposition for fuel.

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