Engineers Without Borders:
My Inspiration and Motivation
I never believed that life-defining moments could exist until I became a member of Engineers Without Borders. During my freshman year of college, I traveled to rural Guatemala. It was my first time ever leaving the country and my eyes were truly opened. We traveled to the community of La Nueva Providencia and worked with them for a little bit over one week to install a water system for their village. We worked long and hard laying pipe with the villagers, finding ways to communicate despite language and cultural barriers.
On the second to last day of our trip, one of the elderly women in the village came up to me and had a request. She asked if I would collect the clothes of EWB volunteers so that she could wash them. We had seen her and many other women in the village standing in the river for hours at a time scrubbing clothes out rocks and laying them in the sun to dry. Knowing that my companions and I were filthy and had brought clothes we didn’t mind ruining, I tried to say no. But she pleaded with me again and said, “I want the last day that I spend standing in the river to be washing the clothes for the people that are bringing us clean water.”
That one moment resonated with me because it was then that I realized that what I do matters. I should work on projects that matter—on projects that possess the power to improve lives.
