As our crowdfunding campaign draws to a close, we, the entirety of Pitt EWB, would like to take a minute to thank each and every donor for their generosity. The support that we have received from friends, family, alumni, and even strangers, has been overwhelming. We know that this past year has taken a financial toll on so many, and we truly appreciate every single dollar that has been donated so far to help support our community. However, our campaign isn’t over quite yet!

Today is the last day to donate, and while we are grateful that we have already surpassed our goal, we are still aiming to receive donations in these final hours. If you are able to, please share with friends, coworkers, or family members who may be interested in donating to our campaign and helping to improve the lives of the people of Carijana. While we have already hit our goal of fundraising for 5 latrines, the community is still in need of 40 more (we have built 5 already, with a goal of 50 total). Whatever is donated to this campaign will go directly to funding the construction of additional latrines.

This pandemic has highlighted the importance of public health and the impact that it can have on the quality of life and life expectancy of a community. Remote communities, with little health infrastructure, are even harder hit by illness and disease, but are oftentimes neglected and forgotten about. We are not letting that happen to Carijana. This community is full of vibrant, happy people who continually express to us how thankful they are that we are helping to improve their public health and empowering them to raise their quality of life, and providing them with the skills to be able to solve their own problems in the future. And while it is our engineering knowledge that allows us to help them, we would not be able to do so without your generosity. We will continue to provide updates once this implementation has been completed, so you can see first hand where your donations went and the lives that you have impacted. So please continue to spread the word, and thank you again to every single person who has donated - you have helped to improve the lives of an entire community.

Thank you all for your amazing generosity and interest in helping us build critical infrastructure in the community of Carjiana, Bolivia. We could not be more grateful for this tremendous support from everyone involved in this process. Currently, the $5,000 goal for this campaign has been surpassed and we will be able to fund the construction of 5 latrines in Carijana! However, it’s not over yet. Our campaign will be ending tomorrow. Please continue helping to spread the word and helping the community of Carijana!

Not only does every donation made help us purchase more materials to construct more latrines in Carijana, but your support ultimately provides healthier lifestyles for the children and families of Carijana. Your donations also allow us, the students in Engineers Without Borders, to gain invaluable working experience with small communities and allows our members earn future opportunities such as internships and co-ops. Your support is invaluable and greatly appreciated.

Our team is continuing to progress on developing public health education plans for the citizens of Carijana, Bolivia. These plans include teaching the basics of women’s health, proper handwashing, safe garbage disposal, and proper maintenance of latrines. We are also progressing on making these education plans accessible and inviting towards people of all demographics and native-languages within the community to increase the quality of life for all citizens! 

Thank you all so much for your continued support of our project, we really appreciate you continually sharing and supporting our cause! With your help, we are optimistic that we can create a big change in the community of Carijana! 

Thanks to all of the donors for their amazing generosity, we have surpassed our $5,000 goal for our campaign! We could not be more grateful for the tremendous support from everyone involved for making this possible. However, it’s not over yet. There are still 7 days left to donate in order to help the community of Carijana even more.

Another big fundraising event we have coming up is the livestream on April 17, from 6 to 9 PM. You can sit back, relax, and visit our Facebook page to enjoy the livestream. Our team members have plenty of entertaining challenges planned that you don’t want to miss. Don’t forget to donate while watching!

Meanwhile, the development of a public health education plan continues. The team has split up into groups to research the different aspects of public health that go along with the use of the latrines: women’s health, safe garbage disposal, proper cleaning and maintenance of latrines, and handwashing. We have met with public health education professionals to try to figure out the best methods of effectively teaching the community with different demographics and language barriers. In sum, we are making great progress towards having a successful education plan.

Once again, we thank everyone who donated to our project, shared, liked, or commented on our posts! We are beyond grateful to have already met our goal, but we hope to keep going and raise as much as we can!

We are in the final two weeks of our campaign! We first want to take a moment and thank everyone again for their generous donations and support for our project. At this time, we are 95% of the way to our goal with donations totaling to $4,791. 

In general, EWB projects consist of 5 stages: Pre-assessment, Assessment, Alternatives Analysis, Implementation, Monitoring and Evaluation/Project Close-out. In this update, we wanted to provide more information on how your donation supports the project past the implementation phase we are in now.

EWB Pitt has a commitment to maintain our community partnership long beyond the actual construction of the latrines. We want to ensure our solution is the best it can be and is easily sustained by the community. The monitoring phase is used exactly for this purpose. It is another data collection phase focused on measured improvement of community health and observational studies of sustainability with our implementation of these sanitation solutions. For Carijana, these measurements include items such as how often members of the community are sick, as well as observations of latrine maintenance. This phase is also an ideal time to get more informal community feedback about the project. The metrics that we examine are compared to the baseline information that we gathered during the assessment phase on our trip in the Summer of 2019. These metrics and the community feedback are used to measure the success of our project. If successful, we close-out our project by turning it over to our parent organization, EWB-USA, who then continue to monitor the project over the next couple years to further ensure long-term success. 

While the ultimate goal of EWB projects is community empowerment through sustainable improvements, our club members also gain valuable real-world engineering experience as a result. Every phase of our projects require robust project management skills and attention to detail, some of the most crucial skills to have as an engineer. Monitoring and evaluation are no exception, especially considering the amount of data we need to collect. Many of our members have voiced how valuable their EWB experience has been to their internships and co-ops!

Again, we want to thank our donors. Without you, our project could not progress into the next phases! 

As we hit the halfway point of our campaign, we wanted to take time to thank everyone who has donated to our project, shared, liked or commented on one of our members’ social media posts, or just generally spread the word about what we do! Our team is so appreciative of everyone’s generosity, and we sincerely thank each and every one of you. So far, we have reached 85% of our goal, which we couldn’t be more grateful for!

Our team has been hard at work on our remote implementation plans. We recently heard back from the EWB-USA office and learned that our pre-implementation paperwork has been approved! This paperwork includes all the details of our planned implementation including our construction manual, designs, schedules and future maintenance plans. We worked extensively with the community in Carijana to ensure our design fully meets their needs, and is feasible to implement. As soon as we can, we intend to begin our implementation after Bolivia’s dry season, when our partner NGO, EIA, can safely travel to the community.

Currently, the team is working on putting together an education plan to detail how we intend to help the community learn about safe practices for using the latrines after implementation. We have exploratory teams gathering information on a host of public health issues including women’s health, safe garbage disposal, proper cleaning and maintenance of latrines, clean water usage, and handwashing.

Once again, thank you all so much for your continued support of our project! We are optimistic that we will hit our goal soon, and ask that you continue to help share our campaign - every dollar counts!

Thank you everyone for helping us get to $4,136 in the past three weeks! This amount is enough to construct 4 latrines for 4 families in Carijana, Bolivia. This week we talk to our team’s mentoring engineer, Dennis! 

A brief background of our mentor: Dennis graduated from Carnegie Mellon as a civil engineer. He has been with EWB Pittsburgh chapter since 2016, but has had experiences working and leading other international organizations, such as the US Peace Corps, Habitat for Humanity, and Global Communities. Dennis has worked 40+ years doing international humanitarian engineering and he has traveled the globe working in over 10 countries!

Some examples of projects Dennis has been involved with: 

• Worked in El Salvador on housing reconstruction for earthquake victims.
• Helped prepare materials that were used to build 75 homes in Puebla, Mexico as part of the pre-construction staff.
• Constructed the roofing for 100 homes in Lonavla, India.
• Served as a technical advisor in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010

Dennis has many more projects he's been involved with, but one of his proudest experiences was years after he worked with the community in Tingo Pucara, Ecuador. Years after his water sanitation project in the community, Dennis saw that due to the clear chlorinated water the community had the lowest baby fatality rate, and lowest rate of gastro diseases in the area! He finds the most rewarding part of his jobs is seeing how his projects can and has directly helped communities and improved lives. 

As a whole, the Bolivia team thanks Dennis for his dedication and guidance he has given us in our current project!

Fun Facts about Dennis!

• He is fluent in Spanish
• He is an international celebrity
  1. He appeared on TV twice in El Salvador
  2. Dominica where he taught how to construct hurricane resistant roofs
• He was the first city engineer, job foreman, and architect for the Siguatepeque, 5th largest city in Honduras
  1. You would drive across his bridge that connected the main road and Siguatepeque 

Once again, thank you for surreal support. As we approach our goal, we ask that you continue sharing our campaign to help us exceed our goal!

Thank you everyone for helping us get to $3,236 in just over a week. This sizable contribution will allow us to construct 3 latrines to serve 3 families in Carijana, Bolivia.

Just as important to living a healthier life as having a safe physical space to go to the bathroom is knowing the proper health and maintenance information surrounding that. Infrastructure means nothing if it is not used or maintained in the long run for both this generation and the next. That’s why in addition to conducting all the proper engineering analysis, designing latrines, and figuring out an implementation plan, we are working on a public health campaign as well.

We have a traditional education plan encompassing all the important information: how to use the toilet; how to wash hands at a tippy-tap (the handwashing station being constructed); how to care for the latrine on a daily, monthly, and annual basis; how to care for a tippy-tap; how to keep water clean and safe; how clean water needs to be to use it; basics of disease transmission; safe garbage disposal; and women’s health. That is a lot! The content covered could be a whole book. However, to make sure that the information actually gets received and learned, we need to keep it as concise and visual based, opposed to text, as possible. Deciding what to include and how to include it obviously creates a challenge for us, so we seek advice from our more experienced mentors for what works and what doesn’t. We also reach out to past members who have become public health professionals for their input in public health education.

Thank you all so much for your amazing support within just these first two days of the campaign! As of writing this we are sitting at $1,310 raised in the first 3 days from our campaign’s launch. We could not be more grateful to our donors!

Meanwhile, we also wanted to provide some more detail to the prepwork that is going into this Summer’s remote implementation. This past week our team turned in our pre-implementation paperwork to the EWB-USA office. This paperwork includes all of the details for our planned implementation including our construction manual, designs, schedules, and future maintenance plans. These pieces have been reviewed by our mentors in the EWB Pitt Professional Chapter and are now being reviewed by the professional engineers at EWB-USA. After this review and any revisions, we will also provide a list of materials that are going to the community to EIA so that their project engineer can also provide us an in-country perspective.

We are also working with the community of Carijana and EIA to coordinate dates for the implementation itself. We intend to begin our implementation in May after Bolivia’s dry season has begun, and our partners can safely travel to the community. This is of course dependent on the Bolivian COVID-19 situation, which we are working with EIA to ensure that our travel will be safe for our community. Carijana has already expressed their excitement to get started. The community is ready to gather what materials they can and begin digging pits for the latrines that we plan to implement this summer.

Once again, thank you for the amazing outpouring of support so early on. We ask that you continue to help share our campaign to help us exceed our goals!