While most SMU students spent spring break relaxing, a select group of Lyle students decided to volunteer overseas.
SMU’s Engineers Without Borders chapter sent some of its members to Panimacac, Guatemala to install a water pump that has the potential to help an entire community.
The water pump will help farmers with irrigation and provide a reliable source of drinking water to the rural Guatemalan village.
None of the students had ever visited the site before, and only a few of them speak Spanish fluently.
However, the students prepared for their trip over a span of two years.
“We are putting in a better engineering system, an enhanced system,” Travis Miller, president of SMU’s Engineers Without Borders, said.
An assessment trip took place a few years ago to test the soil and water in the area, but all the students on that trip graduated before work on the project started.
The organization first stumbled upon the project when they were searching the national Engineers Without Borders’ database of potential projects.
Miller said their organization felt the Guatemala trip was manageable for a relatively new organization.
Group members are also passionate about the cause.
“This was a community whose biggest problem was water and once that was clear, it would grow,” Miller said.
The design the engineers mapped was too complicated to complete during spring break.
Miller and other members plan on taking a second trip mid-May.
During the first trip, they began installing the tank and will finish connecting all the pipes and testing the water at the end of the school year.
The student engineers believe their plan is solid, but members are cautious about the final result of their efforts.
“I would say that the biggest challenge will be the one we don’t expect. Obviously, you can come up with the best, most efficient plan possible, but the situation on the ground is never going to be exactly what you thought it would be,” Connor Kite, a junior, said.
Miller is still in disbelief that the trip is happening.
He is excited to give back and change the lives of those who live in the community.
” I don’t think I have fully realized the implications of what we are doing,” Miller said.
“You’re loving people and you’re serving them. That’s a beautiful thing.”