Blueprint Brigade

By Bryan Walsh

Bernard Amadei is the kind of engineer who believes in fate, and here's why. In 1997 he needed to have some landscaping done at his home near the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he has worked as a professor of civil engineering for more than 20 years. He picked a company out of the Yellow Pages, called, and three Mayan Indians from Belize appeared on his doorstep. Amadei, 53, an amiable Frenchman who is quick to connect, listened as the men told him of the poverty back in their home village of San Pablo. He stayed in touch and a few years later accepted an invitation to visit their families in Belize. "I came across little girls who had to carry water back and forth to the village all day, so they couldn't go to school," Amadei says. "I knew that as a civil engineer, there had to be something I could do. "

Amadei soon returned to San Pablo with a team of energetic young engineering students. By adapting centuries-old technology, they designed a pump that could supply water to the community without using electricity. That simple solution--which cost just $14,000, including airfare for Amadei and his students--transformed the lives of the villagers and that of Amadei, who realized he had found his calling as an engineer and an educator. "I could see the kids were really interested," he says. "And I could see the huge social impact that a small project can have."

That was the genesis of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a nonprofit group that focuses on low-tech, high-impact projects in the developing world, implemented almost entirely by student engineers. If you think this sounds a bit warm and fuzzy for the right-angle world of engineering, think again. Since Amadei launched the national organization in 2002, more than 230 affiliated chapters have sprung up in universities and professional firms around the U.S., comprising some 8,000 members, with more overseas. EWB has built everything from aqueducts in Mali to solar panels in Rwanda. And the group is changing the way engineering is taught in schools by demanding that its practitioners address the long-neglected needs of the billions of people who live without clean water or decent sanitation.

At no-nonsense Johns Hopkins University, for example, engineering professor William Ball says more than half of his department's students have signed up with the school's EWB chapter, which is engaged in long-term work to improve irrigation in rural South Africa. "I know for a fact that many students come here because we talk about this sort of work," says Ball. "And that's the kind of student we want to attract."

Kate Beggs is just that sort. The UC-Boulder grad student worked with Amadei last year in Rwanda, where their team designed solar lighting for a local clinic and gave scores of young girls lessons in the basics of engineering. The chance to temper classroom learning in the heat of the real world is enough to draw many pupils to the group. But an increasing number of students, like Beggs, believe EWB will shape their professional future. "For our generation of engineers coming out of school, we won't just go the usual route of client work and consulting," says Beggs. "We're looking to get out there and make a difference on the ground."

For Amadei, who by nature is less an organizer than an inspirer, EWB is just the beginning. When he's not getting his fingernails dirty in Africa or Asia, he is busy marshaling enthusiasm for what he calls "engineering with soul," which is also the title of a manifesto he's working on. (His schedule doesn't leave much time for the usual university research, but as Amadei notes with a laugh, "I can't be fired. I have tenure.") That means applying the hard practices of engineering to the soft problems of humanity, building simple water pumps before fancy suspension bridges. "I've seen children dying in front of me, and that's marked me for life," he says. "I'm doing my little work to change that." To contact Bernard Amadei and Engineers Without Borders, go to www.ewb-usa.org