Ethan Butler is looking for a few good English majors, business majors, and anthropology majors to help him with an engineering project he’s working on.
Butler is president of UConn’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a non-profit humanitarian organization that partners with developing communities worldwide to implement sustainable engineering projects.
The organization strives to train engineering students, graduate engineers, and other professionals in ecologically responsible engineering practices. This means encouraging them to find answers to social concerns, as well as engineering issues, when considering the best solutions for improving the quality of life in communities where the organization has projects.
In a presentation on campus last fall, the founder and president of Engineers Without Borders, University of Colorado engineering professor Bernard Amadei, said: “Our charge as engineers is to increase life expectancy in the developing world.”
Butler agrees. “It feels good to do something that you know is meaningful for a group of people,” he says. “I know I’m putting all my efforts into doing something that will help people survive … and that’s so much more satisfying at the end of the day.”
UConn’s Engineers Without Borders chapter is collaborating with a Massachusetts-based NGO, Casas de la Esperanza, that helps squatter families in Nicaragua to build or purchase their own homes, start businesses, and develop independent communities. The role of the engineering students is to make major repairs to a road approximately two miles long from a makeshift squatters’ village to the city of Granada. This involves doing all the design work, raising funds, hiring workers, and overseeing the project to completion.
This summer, Butler says, “We’re sending four UConn engineering students and an advisor to Nicaragua and we’re coordinating efforts with West Point. They’re going to match us with people power, so we’ll have a total of 10 Engineers Without Borders representatives in the country.
Their goal is to collect all the necessary information to complete the design work on the roadway they’re trying to repair. “It’s a crucial link between a really impoverished community and the city of Granada and it totally washes out during the rainy season, leaving erosion ditches five to six feet deep,” he says. “We need to make the roadway usable year round.”
While the work of Engineers Without Borders is close to his heart, it’s time-consuming, and Butler says serving as president of the group is like having a part-time job. That’s where all those English majors would come in handy … to write grants … and where the business majors can be helpful … creating fund-raising campaigns … and where anthropology majors could help by interpreting the cultural nuances of working with indigenous people.
Although it goes by the title Engineers Without Borders, the organization welcomes anyone who shares its ideals, regardless of their academic background, Butler says. “We need people who have experience with roadway construction, water quality, the developing world, fund raising, social work, and more. We need professional mentorship for our various projects, and welcome volunteers who would be willing to take on that role.”
Even though he’s only just completed his sophomore year, Butler has already made a significant contribution to creating a sustainable earth through his work with Engineers Without Borders, as an active member of the EcoHusky student group, and by serving as an undergraduate representative on the University’s Environmental Policy Advisory Council.
With a major in chemical engineering and minors in molecular and cell biology and environmental engineering, as well as his volunteer work, his dedication is impressive.
“One of the reasons I love UConn,” he says, “is that it gives me the opportunity to sample a little bit of everything. During my freshman year I learned that time is an illusion. I’ve found that when you’re passionate about what you do, you get everything done no matter how much time it takes.”
