Scott Powell, a 30-year-old civil engineer whose expertise is water resources, has served around the world as a volunteer on five Engineering Ministries International (eMi) design teams for one to two weeks each. Below he recounts his most recent experience in Ethiopia.
I recently worked with several other surveyors and civil engineers to design a water supply for a village in remote southwest Ethiopia. The members of the Gewada tribe must now hike several hours each day to fetch water from the same river where they and their animals bathe and drink. The poor water source has caused a myriad of health problems for residents and students in the town.
After investigating several options, our team settled on designing a gravity-fed scheme bringing water from a clean mountain spring. The 21-kilometer pipeline will serve 18,000 people in three different villages, and will likely consist of several spring boxes, a water treatment system, storage tanks, distribution piping, and multiple community water taps.
In the tiny motel complex where we slept each night, some two hours from the project site, the town generators would frequently stop and shut down the pump that fed water into the hotel’s storage tank. For two days, our design team had no access to running water at all. All of a sudden, the gravity of the global water crisis hit home. We were only getting a tiny glimpse of the daily lives of the almost 1 billion people around the world who have no access to clean drinking water.
The enormity of the need was almost overwhelming, but it inspired me to continue on with the work. Over the next few months, we will piece together a design to meet this most basic of needs—to bring water to a village.
