Each year during the rainy season in the mountains of Bolivia, kids that attend school in the rural community of Japo must swim across a flooding river to get to class. Engineers in Action (EIA) serves communities across Bolivia, like Japo, where rivers become dangerous or impossible to pass, making education, healthcare, and markets inaccessible. By pairing college students with bridge projects in these towns, EIA facilitates both sustainable international development and technical and social learning opportunities for future engineers. That was the main reason I jumped on the opportunity to get involved with Duke Engineers for International Development (DEID) and their partnership with EIA. I became an engineer to apply math and science in a context that works to improve the lives of others and future generations, which is exactly what EIA’s Bridge Program aims to have students do. During the semester, we worked on courses that taught us how to make design decisions, calculate failure modes, and draw out professional engineering plans along with cultural communications and construction training. After preparing presentations on the bridge design and construction plan, we received permission to travel in the summer and help the community build the bridge. SPIRE’s enrichment funds were critical and much appreciated to help cover the costs for health insurance, sleeping bag and gear, and winter construction clothes – especially since we weren’t paid for the work and had to forego summer jobs to spend time in Bolivia.
While in Bolivia, we worked with the community six days a week for five weeks to complete construction of the pedestrian bridge. Each day the community would provide around 10 volunteers to work with us (or more like outwork us since we were at 14,000 ft above sea level). Starting with excavation to building the foundation and walls to pulling cables and putting in decking, the bridge began to come together. It was an experience full of physical challenges, new friendships, and a lot of creative problem-solving. Once complete, we celebrated the inauguration of the bridge with the community and leaders from the municipality – the perfect way to commemorate the work we had done together and the sense of accomplishment we all felt.
This experience provided a combination of technical skills and engineering communication skills that will be invaluable to me in the future. With videos that walked through the structure of standard suspended bridges and how to use AutoCAD to print professional designs, I was able to run calculations for the factors of safety and make decisions about where we could make the bridge more efficient. Talking with the professional engineers mentoring us, I learned about components they pay more attention to, how to use governing building codes, and how they check theirs and others’ work. In the field, they taught me how to think through small construction changes and to evaluate their safety. In addition to these technical skills, learning to be an effective communicator was one of the most important parts of this trip. During the semester, writing group reports and giving presentations to EIA to explain our work and decisions increased my comfort with understanding my audience and how to synthesize and combine information. Daily construction meetings where leaders explicitly encouraged each of us to ask questions and speak up ensured everyone understood their role and created an inclusive and safer environment. One of the unique communication challenges we faced was the language barrier between the community and students. Having cultural competency training beforehand and being mindful of those differences when talking with volunteers and municipality leaders helped foster better relationships that were important to exciting the community about the bridge. Overall, this project was a meaningful way to develop my engineering judgement and evaluation abilities through a design-build project that was thoughtful in intention and execution.
