A Cleaner Vision for Fun
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Read StorySix members of WPI’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) traveled to Shungubug Grande, a small community in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, to address structural issues with the village’s water collection and distribution systems and to improve the quality of the water. The EWB group has worked with the community since 2023, fundraising, designing, and problem solving as an on-campus, extracurricular activity.
With club mentor Professor Raúl Picó, the travel team included Sarah Gardner ’27, Octávio Bittar ’27, Brynn McElligott ’27, Keagan Hitt ’27, Jorge Saa ’26, and Sophia Gross ’26, who kept a journal during the weeklong visit in May 2025.
Meeting the community
We arrived on Monday morning and were immediately brought into their community meeting space. We were so high in the mountains that we couldn’t see farther than 20 feet before the clouds obscured any views of the rest of the area. As we waited for some of the community members to finish cooking a small meal for us in the attached kitchen, the eldest from the community took seats in the remaining chairs while everyone else stood crowded around the doorway. Surrounded by the smell of cooking corn, we listened to welcome speeches from the president of the water board and other important members of the community, and then Sarah thanked them for welcoming us and expressed the team’s excitement about working with them.
The community members were curious, but a bit reserved, at first. As the clouds parted, revealing trees hundreds of feet tall in the distance, the community opened up and started asking us questions. Once all questions had been answered, the women in the kitchen brought out a light lemon vermella tea, hard-boiled eggs, slices of traditional fresh white cheese, and boiled corn on the cob for us to eat.
We tried it all and discussed the differences between U.S. and Ecuadorian corn, primarily that the Ecuadorian corn was less sweet, more filling, and had much larger kernels. As we ate, the community members excitedly looked through a scrapbook that our team had given them illustrating what we do back at WPI and who the various members of the club are as people. With the mist and low hanging clouds all gone, the meeting ended as we were ushered out of the community building to get a tour of the water system.
Communal lunch
After hiking around the water collection parts of the 50-year-old system, we stopped on the side of the dirt road running up the mountain to eat a communal lunch. The community members were already seated in a circle on rocks with an array of pots and plastic bags filled with food cooked by some women earlier in the morning in the community kitchen. As we approached, we saw that the pots and bags held peeled and unpeeled boiled potatoes, large boiled beans with a tough outer shell, and popcorn! We were told that these foods, along with boiled corn on the cob, make up almost all the community’s entire diet throughout the year. Instructed to just reach into the pots with our hands to grab potatoes and beans, we did so with varying levels of hesitancy at first, and then proceeded to mistakenly try to eat the beans without taking off the shells. We quickly learned that the beans were much better without their shells.
Water testing and scrapbooking
Later in the afternoon, we met with the four young women selected by the community to be trained to conduct water quality tests. After explaining the purpose of the water tests, we showed them step by step how to conduct the two tests as they followed along in the instructional booklet we made for them. The women felt confident and wanted to try for themselves, so with our verbal instructions and the booklet, they tested the water of a house nearby. While still being serious about learning how to test, the women laughed and enjoyed the process.
At one point, when the water in the test vial needed to be shaken, one of the women exaggeratedly pretended to shake the water really hard as the other women laughed along. After we confirmed that they had no questions, we introduced to them the scrapbook we wanted them to make about their community for us to take back for our chapter to get to know them all.
With the supplies all around them on the log they were seated on, they hesitantly began discussing amongst themselves what they should write about. Ten minutes later, they were laughing at jokes together and asking us if they could draw on their pages to make them prettier.
Sarah showed them how to use her Polaroid camera to take photos of each other to put on their pages, and they all spent a few minutes straightening their clothes, wiping their faces, and smoothing their hair with their hands to be able to look nicer, all while laughing. When they learned that the photos develop faster in the light, they held them up to the sun and then teasingly complained when the clouds covered the sun. By the end, they insisted on taking a photo of our team for the community to keep.
Cleaning the water storage tank
The next day, we started the work to upgrade the water storage tank. When we arrived, we saw that due to leaking pipes, the entire area around the base of the tank was very muddy and filled with overgrown grasses, so two of the women in the community used specialized tools to dig out around the tank. They also dug a trench from the tank to the hillside so the water trapped around the tank could drain. Once that was almost finished, Brynn got inside the drained tank with a flat shovel and a bucket to remove the sediment that had collected on the bottom. This process was not a clean job and she had to have our van driver empty the bucket and fill it with clean water every few minutes so she could rinse the bottom easier. Sarah and I used wire brushes and bleach to clean the dirt, moss, and any other debris that had collected on the outer tank wall over the years. All of this work had to be done so the waterproof paint that we would apply to the tank walls later in the week would stay on and do its job properly.
Installing new pipe fittings
After a lot of experimenting with different techniques using the limited tools we had on hand, we created large openings in the tank walls and then began the process of installing the new pipe fittings in those openings. Jorge, Sarah, Brynn, and I spent a while preparing wood boards and wire to create forms to pour the concrete into. When we were almost ready to begin pouring, Favian, the skilled community member helping us with the tank upgrades, stopped us. He told us that it would be easier and faster if we didn’t use the forms and instead used a technique that he knew. After Jorge and Rafael, the Ecuadorian engineer with us from our partner non-governmental organization Engineers In Action, mixed concrete in a special bucket, Favian showed us his technique, which included packing concrete and bits of rock and brick into the hole around the new pipe with his hands before using a trowel to smooth it over.
He then got in the tank and did the same from the inside. We weren’t sure at first if this technique would work as we were concerned of the concrete collapsing under its own weight out from the hole. But after watching for a few minutes, it seemed to turn out well enough and Rafael told us it was good enough. We decided that the rest of the holes would be filled using this technique too, which saved us some time and effort.
Trapped in a catchment
While taking measurements and data from some of the water catchments, Sarah went inside one to get more information about its structure. She was recording a video explaining the intricacies of the structure when she looked up to see two community members looking into the catchment at her! She finished the video, stood up, and saw a dozen community members standing around the catchment staring at her in confusion and curiosity. They started to ask Raúl, who was the only person with us at the time who spoke both Spanish and English fluently, what she was doing inside of the catchment, and when he explained they started laughing at the situation and the sight of her standing with just her head and shoulders sticking out of the structure.
Contractor confusion
While our team was working on improving the storage tank and collecting data, the contractors we hired were expanding one of the water catchments. At one point when we were checking in on their progress, we got caught in some miscommunication. Sarah and I were asking them about their plan for where the piping would go and how the water would go into the catchment. As Raúl translated the contractors’ responses, we were getting more and more confused as if they were talking about the piping going to a different community and other details that just did not make sense to us. Finally, we were able to reword our questions for them and got a much clearer answer which aligned with what we originally thought they were going to do.
Mismeasured pipes
On Thursday morning, Octávio and I were tasked with figuring out how to piece together the piping that we had bought the afternoon before. We were told by Rafael that “We could do it,” and he jokingly told us that it should be easy, “like LEGOs.” We spent 20 minutes sitting on the grass getting more and more confused because we couldn’t figure out how to connect them or figure out what went with which pipe on the tank. Rafael tried to help us until he realized that all the piping we bought was a quarter- to half-inch larger in diameter than it should have been! We couldn’t believe that we got the wrong size pipes, but it did feel good to know it wasn’t Octávio’s and my fault for not being able to figure it out. We spent the next half an hour deciding which pipes could be used for other pipes in the tank—luckily, about half of them. We radioed the other half of the team and asked if they were okay with driving to the pipe store, buying new pipes, and returning to the community right then. This trip would take between 2.5 and 3 hours in total, eating up a lot of our day. We had only been in the community for a little over an hour, but leaving to get the pipes then would allow us to have enough time in the afternoon to install them, rather than having to do it on Friday, our last day in the community. The rest of the team agreed to get the new pipes, so we drove to the store, desperately hoping that we would get store credit for the pipes we were returning. Rafael and the store employees spoke about our situation and they agreed to accept our returns. We got the new pipes in the correct measurements and drove back to the community. After eating a quick lunch, we got to work connecting all of the pipes and 2 hours later, we were done.
Connecting the two storage tanks
Earlier in the week, the community had expressed interest in connecting the two water systems that fed the community, so any extra water from the system that fed fewer houses would be diverted to the other system that was connected to many more houses. We thought that this would be a great idea and within our means to implement on this trip. So, on Wednesday, Keagan and Octávio walked the quarter-mile stretch of land between the two tanks to find the shortest, easiest, and most efficient route for the piping to go. By the time that we arrived on Thursday morning, the community members had already started their minga, or required community work, to dig the trench for the piping to connect the two systems along the route that had been chosen the day before.
In the afternoon, we connected the overflow pipe of the system producing extra water to the connecting pipe and the community laid the connecting pipe in the trenches. The pipe had to cross a road so instead of digging a trench under the dry, compressed dirt of the road, the community strung the pipe across the road. The pipe was held up by the hill on one side and on the other, a metal pipe that they had cut and cemented into the ground. Once that was all done, we used special pipe connectors to attach the new pipe to the existing water distribution pipe of the second system.
Late-night water testing
On Tuesday and Thursday, after we ate dinner and cleaned up at the hotel, the six of us students met in the dining room to do extensive water testing on the samples we had collected from 16 different locations. On Tuesday, Sarah and Brynn used pipettes to prepare the Petrifilm that would grow colonies of the bacteria present in the water in an incubator over 48 hours. In the bathroom, the only available location for the tap water required, Jorge and I tested the water for its turbidity. Meanwhile, Keagan and Octávio kept us entertained with their jokes and attempts at taking good photos of us working. On Thursday, Sarah, Jorge, and Brynn, using their phone flashlights for better lighting, counted the fecal coliforms and E. coli colonies that had grown on each of the Petrifilms. Octávio, Keagan, and I tested the water samples for phosphates, nitrates, nitrites, and ammonia, a process that took about 5 minutes per test. We managed to keep up our morale with Oreos and lots of laughter.
Farewell meal and soccer game
Friday and its farewell meal came long anticipated. We knew from the time we applied to be part of the travel team that on the last day in the community we would be presented with a traditional meal including guinea pig. In early afternoon, we were brought down to the community’s soccer field and we sat at a table while the community finished preparing the meal. Once we all were served bowls of boiled potatoes with half a cuy (pronounced “kwee”), the indigenous word for guinea pig, on top, we began to eat the meat. We found the easiest method of eating it was ripping bits of the meat off with our fingers. Although it took a bit of time to adjust to, most of us decided that it was pretty good! The meat was salty, but unlike any other meat we had tasted before.
After the team and the community finished eating, speeches were given, the community presented us with their scrapbook (which was better than we ever imagined it would be), and we shared some of our favorite snacks and candies from the U.S.
Then it was time for the soccer game. We had heard that the community didn’t have a soccer ball, so we bought one for them that morning. We played a casual but very competitive game of soccer against the community, which involved a lot of laughter, rough plays, and time for us non-Ecuadorians (not used to the elevation) to catch our breath. We said goodbye to the community that we had grown so connected with soon after that with a promise to stay in communication with them about the remaining work to be done.
What’s next?
Despite this trip being an immense success, there is still a lot of work left to help the people of Shungubug Grande. We still have two catchments and a collection tank that need to be repaired or rebuilt. We also have to research and implement additional measures to address the levels of fecal coliforms present in the community’s water. The community also has asked us to help them with building a water system solely for irrigating fields, in the hope that they will be able to grow enough crops to sell the surplus of what they keep for their own subsistence. If you would like to support our ongoing work, which we fundraise entirely ourselves, please consider donating to our chapter: https://support.ewb-usa.org/fundraiser/967431
Want to learn more? Hear Sophia and Sarah talk about this adventure on the
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