One of our civil engineering professors, Linda Phillips, presented us with the possibility of going to an underdeveloped area to volunteer on a construction site for our senior design project. This kind of project has never really been explored at Michigan Tech so it will be a learning experience for all involved. Enough people were willing to give this a try so it was taken to the board for approval. Once approved, it was decided that the best location would be Santa Cruz, Bolivia since Linda already had connections there with people planning to build a school who could use our help.

     A group of students chose to embark on a trip to Santa CruzBolivia with the objective of completing their senior design project. Thiswas merely the beginning of an adventure that would broaden their horizons, inspire personal growth and reflection and introduce them to a culture that is different from anything that they had ever experienced. This trip was to become a part of the college experience never to be forgotten.
     The trip to Bolivia enabled college students to help a growingcommunity in a developing nation and learn new techniques of construction in an environment that was much different than the United States. The construction of a building on a small grade school campus required creativity, adaptation and patience, among many other things. It has often been said that volunteering not only helps the cause that is being contributed to, but brings a sense of personal gratification and accomplishment. In the case of the project in Santa Cruz, this was the case. The group of Michigan Technological University students were able to help     construct a brick building  and learn about construction, leadership and working as a team.
   Another of the goals of the project was to be able to see the building first hand and help the community with a flooding problem that they were experiencing. The students were able to use their civil and environmental engineering background to design a system that would help divert and store the run-off from the surrounding area. This required surveying, research, and communication  in order to put together several options as to how to deal with the excessive run-off.
 

Los Pinos Barrio is on of the areas that the Santa Cruz mayor’s officehad pointed out as the place where many children drop out of school, leave their families to work on the street.  In many cases, they become street kids with no connection to their families, no education and are on drugs.  This was an area that the church wanted to work to try to keep the families together,keep kids in school and out of the drug scene.

Nueva Vida Methodist church (associated with the John Wesley school) began working in the Los Pinos barrio about December 1994 with vacation Bible school.  At the same time they did a survey of the community asking what the needs were.  The most important need was for a kindergarten. The government had changed the law and required kinder before a child could enter first grade.  There were no kinders close by.  A mother would need to ride a communitybus with her young child to a school and back home…then repeat the processto pick up the child.  The mothers didn’t have time or money forthis, so children simply did not attend school. In 1998, they began a kindergartenwith 14 students enrolled but the first day only 7 kids showed up!  Itrained and the small building that they were using flooded out.  The MennoniteCentral Committee let the church use their facility for the first three weeksof school. By the end of the first week, there was 39 students enrolled in their kindergarten.

In June 1998, the church began building an elementary school on the property that they bought from the Mennonite Central Committee.  The foundations are built for two story buildings although only the first story was built originally.  With the help of teams from Greensboro, NC, Manitowoc, WI, Michigan and Cincinnati/Dayton, they were able to build two large classrooms and a set of bathrooms for the school.  In 1999, they had a team from Ohio that built another classroom and an office, making it possible for the church to offer kinder through fifth grade.

In June and July 2000, teams from Onalaska, WI, Greensboro, NC and Ohio built the first of the classrooms on the second floor and a storage/library plus a kiosk under the stairway to the second floor.

As part of Methodist Educational Services, the new elementary school was recently named Colegio Esther Arias.  Ester was the wife of the First bishop of the Bolivian Methodist Church and was very active in Christian education and in the development of a child feeding/tutoring and health care program for low income children in both urban and rural areas.

All the construction is of open face brick with cement columns and cement floor.  The second floor classrooms have time floors.  The roof is of DURALIT, which is a cement fiber tile.  There are 3 bathrooms for girls, 2 bathrooms and a shower for boys, 1 bathroom for the kindergarten and 1 for the teachers.

In January 2001, MTU students began working on the church sanctuary.  It was also made from open face brick.  The two side walls of the sanctuary were completely finished.  There were eight columns poured and also fill was placed and compacted for the concrete floor.

Any funds or donations would go to provide building materials to be able to continue the construction of the church/community building. Some of the material may include the roof, floors, windows, doors, protectors, glass, etc.  You can contact Susie Henry at  henry@mail.scbbs-bo.com

- Written by Susie Henry

There were four local construction workers hired by the church to help with the job.  They had already poured the foundation and finished four of the columns.  Our first day on the job was to haul bricks to the side of the foundation for the start of the brick walls.  The hired hands showed us the ins and outs to laying bricks.
 

As the days progressed, the wall got higher and higher.  Before long we needed some scaffolding.   The scaffolding was made from scrap lumber and ladders, but it did its job.   The large gaps in the bricks are doors and windows.  There was also rebar sticking out of the columns to tieinto the brick walls.  The rebar was laid flat and the bricks and mortarwere placed on top of it.
 
 

While the girls were high up on the scaffolding, the boys were busy hauling concrete to pour the rest of the columns.  They had an assembly line to make the process go by faster.  They would hand the buckets up one by one and the guy at the top would pour it in.  They continued this process until the entire column mold was filled.
 

As the days progressed, the walls got higher and more columns were poured.  Some fill had been dumped at the site, so one of the mornings was spent hauling the fill around the site and compacting it with home made compactors.

In the mean time, two students from our group (Jennifer and Brent) began to survey the land.  There is a very bad flood problem in the area and the new site for the next classrooms for the school has been flooded out many times.  Jennifer and Brent used a make shift rod and an old transit to do the survey.  From there they were able to get the elevation of the land and make a topographicgraph from the information.

The week came to an end and we didn’t have much time left.  The second wall was finished on our last day there.  We had  accomplished a lot!
 

This part of the trip was by far the most memorable.  Even though there was a language barrier we made friendships that will never be forgotten and learned as much as we could in a short time about their culture.

The first day we arrived in Bolivia we were invited for snacks at the school where we would be working.  Some of the school children had also prepared a welcoming song and dance for us.  We had no idea that we were going to havesuch a warm welcome from the community.  After we unpacked our things andrested from the trip for a bit we got right to work.  We met the men we wouldbe working with; Mario, Vincente, Elias, and Don Ari.  At first it was alittle hard to try and figure out what they wanted each of us to do but soonwe got a system working and pretty much stayed with it for the remainder ofthe time there.  The language barrier never seemed to cause many problems.  There were a few people in the group that could speak Spanish very well sowe were fortunate.  What we didn’t know in Spanish, or they didn’t know inEnglish, we used hand motions and pointed to things to get our ideas across.  We worked very effectively together.  We ate almost all of our meals withthese men and became very good friends with them.  We started joking on thejob and at meals.
After we had been in Bolivia for a few days we were invited to a game night with some of the students from around the area.  Many of them were the same age as us and also attending college.  We played games that got us more acquainted and comfortable around each other.  We have to admit that they did everything in their power to welcome us, try to make friends, and make us feel at home.  Another night we invited them to where we were staying and we all played card games.  It was more fun than any of us imagined!
 

We also had the opportunity to attend dinner in groups of three at some of the families houses.  This is when we really got to see how they lived and talk more about their families and what they did.  This was a very eye opening experience.  In most cases it was not just one family that attended the meal.  The whole neighborhood wanted to see what was going on and what we were like so they came around too.

All this made the day we would go home even harder.  On the last day we were in Bolivia the men we worked with bought each of us a present.  We had never expected anything like this.  It brought tears to all our eyes.  That last night was also very special.  The community members also bought each of us a special gift and presented it to us at a going away party.  The Students and Women from the community did their cultural dances in all the fancy attire.  It was truly amazing to watch.  Saying good bye to all these people that night was one of the saddest things some of us have ever had to do
 

.
Memories on this trip were made from the people we met.  They are very special and will never be forgotten.

  On the weekend that the we were in Bolivia, we were able to travel into themountains and visit a town called Samaipata. The first stop on the weekendtrip was the Fort of Samaipata. This is an old Aztec town that is set at the top of a mountain and has only been restored and protected in the last ten years. The ruins are still in amazing condition and several foundations and some walls of homes are still visible.

The view from the ruins is incredible. From the top of the mountain, it is possible to spot villages in the valleys and agricultural fields spread over the hills. Samaipata is on the border of the rain forest and the land is verylush and green. From the top, the winding road can be seen and it is hard to believe where you must travel in order to reach the top.

On the Sunday of the weekend trip, we traveled to a cloud forest, which is a kind of rain forest. This rain forest is high up in the mountains and the ferns that grow there get there water from the moisture in the air. Therain forest is called a giant fern forest and looking at the ferns it is understandable that this is its name. The fern are as large as a grown tree and the fronds are enormous. The forest is the habitat for a wide variety of wildlife, including monkeys and parrots.
 

 

  The trail was slippery in the forest, as there is always moisture in theair and it seems that nothing stays dry for long. The hike was not easy, butwas worth the views and the experience. From the top of this mountain, thefog was so thick, that it was not possible for the us to see more than 20’in front them. Again, it was obvious that this was a cloud rain forest.

The weekend was a success and contributed greatly to the experience of the trip. We were able to see the sites and meet more people.  It helped to betterdefine the country that is Bolivia.

For most of the group members the trip to Bolivia took a lot of preparation.  Of coarse there are always the spontaneous people in a group who like to wait till the last minute and do everything-but that doesn’t work for all of us.  The first and most important thing we had to do was make sure we had enough money to pay for the trip.  This included our plane fare,the class itself, and the lab fees which would be used to buy some of the materials for building.  The next step was to get the whole group together for aninformational meeting with Jim Cross.  Jim is the director of study abroadand had some very helpful information to give us.  Of coarse there werea lot of forms to fill out, but we also talked about any fears or concerns we had.  Jim and Linda both explained a little bit of what the culture and people of Bolivia were like and some things that we should expect. We talked about what we could eat and what we should stay away from, the necessary vaccinations,and how to be safe while in a foreign country. All of this was very beneficialbecause none of us had ever been to Bolivia before. We were also informedof some of the important things we should bring with us and how much extra moneywould be appropriate.  The last thing we did at this meeting was decideto setup a class list so when anyone had a question or some information to share the whole group would be informed.

Although all the members of this group are civil and/or environmental engineers, there was not one person in the whole group who knew everybody.  Actually, there were many of us who had never met before.  This being the case, we decided to start having group meetings mostly just so we could get acquainted with everyone.  We would be spending a lot of time together very soon and we all wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be any differences between us that would keep the group from having a good time.  We had meetings away from school, in a more laid back atmosphere so we could just relax, talk with everyone, and have a good time.  We went to other group members houses, went bowling, and went out for pizza.  Not everyone was always able to attend every meeting because of our different schedules but we all did our best.  Although everyone got along very well it was still a good thing to do because it made us just that much closer when we got to Bolivia,and made working together easier.  These meetings also gave us a chanceto talk once again about any concerns we had, what we had discovered in ourindividual research of the country, ideas for our design project, and whatwe were expecting when we would arrive.

Each of the group members did their own background research on Bolivia depending on what they felt was necessary.  Some of us were interested to find out how the people lived, what kinds of food they ate, what the climate would be like while we were there, and what, if anything, we had to be careful or cautious of.

As with traveling to any foreign country there were many precautions to be aware of for our trip such as vaccines, the food that you eat, water you drink,and how to protect yourself and your money.

The most important vaccination to get was for Hepatitis.  Bolivia is a poor country and diseases are prevalent here.  Other vaccinations that members of the group had were for Typhoid Fever, Yellow Fever, Tetanus, and pills for Malaria.  Yellow Fever and Malaria are both to protect from mosquitos that carry disease and is most needed in urban areas. Since we spent most of our time in the city it was not mandatory but just a preventative measure.  Typhoid is a disease that is contracted from eating foods thatare not prepared well or from water that is contaminated. Most people did not receive this vaccine either because all our food was prepared with strict guidelines and we drank bottled water, but it was an option. Allthe fruits and vegetables we consumed had to be washed and peeled before we could eat them. We could not brush our teeth with the running water, even though it would not be swallowed.  We used bottled water that had been trucked in especially for our consumption.

We also had to be cautious of our money and possessions we had when we went into the city.  We brought copies of our passports in case they were stolen and locked them in a safe with any extra money we had.  Any money that we would be using we had in a money belt that was worn under our clothes and out of sight.  This is also where we carried our passport.  Our passports had to be with us at all times.  Another copy of our passports was also left at home with family.  Whenever we went into the city, or just about anywhere, we traveled in groups.  There was always one guy in each group and usually one person who could at least speak a little bit of Spanish.  It was important not to draw attention to ourselves so allvaluables such as jewelry and designer clothes were left at home.

It is important to note that no body was harmed or victimized in any way while on the trip, and I don't think anyone ever felt they were in danger,except for maybe when we were in taxis who disobey all driving rules, but it doesn't mean it could not happen as it could anywhere.