A slightly late blog post to send off my four weeks in Mexico, and what a time it was. It’s so hard to distill everything I learned into a blog post, and I know most of my posts have led with the sightseeing – this one, I’ll have that at the bottom.
First and foremost, this trip brought into stark focus how seemingly impossible it is to provide consistent, safe drinking water for communities that don’t have monstrous infrastructure budgets and limited support from the government. Although Mexico is getting better, for a variety of political, cultural, and historical reasons, some of the communities we visited were operating with zero government support, and it’s hard to make a meaningful difference when the problem is so multifaceted. Making clean water is hard, as we learned firsthand trying to purify a bit of local surface water for our own consumption (every group failed). This program focused on how there is no one magic engineering solution to solve the water crisis, and that’s primarily because we cant identify what exactly “solving” it would look like. The organizations with the most impact shared one thing: real community connection, not just handing down a device from on high.
The NGOs we interacted with over the course of the month were all very different, and in some way, that’s a perfect example effective outreach: adapting to the communities you serve, not following a blueprint for success or relying on easy-to-quantify measures of success, like “devices sold” or “wells drilled”. These NGOs are such a massive aid to underserved communities, and the nature of them being small and form-fit to their communities means that they do not get the recognition they deserve outside of the area. I think that’s a shame.
Overall, as an engineer who thought he wouldn’t have the chance to study abroad at Rice due to high credit hours minimums and specific classes required, this was an incredible experience. I know that I would not have gotten as much out of the two classes I was able to take had I been sitting in a quiet, air-conditioned classroom in Houston while learning about the difficulty of water treatment or the process of needs finding and implementation. ISEED is an incredible program to have access to, and I hope as many people as possible take advantage of it.
As I sign off, the sightseeing! Thanks for stopping by.
Finally in the air out of Chiapas after a light 9-hour delay…
A very smoky Irish pub with a live cover band!
The following two photos are from my two days at Cantaro Azul, a small private school in San Cris focused on project-based learning and sustainability. I found a problem from here and wrote it up – maybe you’ll see it in an ENGI course at Rice!
The earthworm compost bed that myself, Yanelli, and Fernando dug through to fertilize the fifth-grade planting beds and the pumpkin patch at Cantaro Azul.
A shot of the main playground at Cantaro Azul.