In the June of 2007, Materials Engineering student Matt Goebel spent two weeks with 8 other Engineers Without Borders (EWB) members in the community of Nueva Vida, Nicaragua. Nueva Vida is a community of 12,000, most of whom are refugees from Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Electricity and water are only available for 8 hours on good days, and are sometimes unavailable for several days or weeks in a row when natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes strike the area. The EWB group worked alongside residents to install two 4000 liter underground holding tanks and a water pump at a health clinic in the heart of the community. The clinic now has a continual clean water supply during crises and daily outages. The health clinic is funded and managed by the local non-profit organization CDCA.

Figure 1: Water tank installation in Nueva Vida

Goebel and EWB returned to Nicaragua in September, 2008; this time visiting the community of Camilo Ortega. While residents live nearby the Nicaragua’s modernized capital city of Managua, extreme poverty limit the communities access to basic amenities such as food, clean water, electricity, and health care. After spending time interacting with families, speaking with employees of the non-profit ATRAVES, and receiving feedback during a community meeting, the group determined that the construction of a health clinic would most effectively address health and economic problems in the community. The group spent the remainder of their time in the country surveying the proposed building site and gathering technical information for the clinic design and construction. The group is currently generating a structural design, and plans on returning to Camilo Ortega in the summer of 2009. The clinic will be staffed by employees of ATRAVES and volunteers from Doctors Without Borders.

Figure 2: Children in Camilo Ortega