Matters of the head and matters of the heart
Amadei says engineers must change their thinking to change the world

BY HOLLY BERETTO
Special to Rice News

”My job as an educator is to create the engineers of the 21st century,” Professor Bernard Amadei told his audience in Alice Pratt Brown Hall’s Stude Concert Hall, where he was the featured speaker for the Nov. 18 President’s Lecture. ”We need engineers who are social entrepreneurs, community builders and peacemakers.”

Amadei is director of the University of Colorado’s Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities and a professor of civil engineering. He is also the founder of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), an international nonprofit organization that sends engineering students, faculty and professionals into developing nations to design solutions to such infrastructure issues as water, renewable energy, sanitation and more.

	BERNARD AMADEI

In introducing Amadei, Rice University President David Leebron cited the engineer’s commitment to ”improving the quality of life in developing countries.” But Amadei wasn’t much interested in talking about his own accomplishments; he was more interested in presenting a passionate argument for why engineers have both the talent and the responsibility to assist the world’s poor.

”I want to talk to you about the ‘other 90 percent,”’ he said, referring to the 5 billion people around the world who live on less than $5 a day. ”I want you to know who they are, what they do and how we can help lift them from poverty.”

In large part, that is the mission of EWB, which Amadei started without realizing he was founding a worldwide organization. When he bought his house in Boulder, Colo., in 1997, he’d hired landscapers to assist with improving the yard. Three showed up and told him they were from Belize, where there was a tremendous problem with helping youth find sustainable futures.

”’Will you help?’ they asked me. I said yes. Two years later, I got an e-mail from one of the guys reminding me, ‘You promised to help.”’

So Amadei and 40 of his students traveled to a tiny village in Belize, where they helped the 250 residents there design a rain pump that fed off a nearby waterfall. The pump allowed the villagers to collect water without having to trek through the jungle to a stream. The cost for the project? $14,000.

”After that trip, 15 students lined up outside my door; that never happens,” Amadei quipped. ”And they were saying to me, ‘This is what we want to do. We’re sick of doing problems 1 through 15 at the end of Chapter 5.’

“‘Well, that’s good,’ I told them. ‘Because I’m sick of grading them.”’

From that one visit to that one village, Engineers Without Borders grew into a worldwide nonprofit with more than 12,000 members tackling 350 separate projects in nearly 40 countries around the globe. Relying on the know-how of engineers and engineering students and the manpower from people in the countries they help, EWB helps residents of developing nations build sustainable infrastructure to provide everyday essentials such as water, drainage, shelter and energy.

”We have the resources to provide water, telecommunications, health for the other 90 percent,” Amadei said. ”The fact that we don’t do it doesn’t speak highly of us as members of the human race.”

Amadei called on engineers to use their thinking and skills on a global scale. He noted that in developing nations, small-technology solutions such as the water pump built in Belize often provide life-changing results. Working with villagers and townspeople helps make those who receive EWB’s aid part of the solution. Too often, Amadei said, Westerners will come into a developing country wanting to help but don’t provide the tools or training to sustain their efforts.

”The world is littered with failed equipment that people don’t know how to use or fix,” he said.

Amadei said that engineers need to listen to the ideas of people in the developing world, to understand what they need and help them to build and maintain the things they need for sustainable living. Doing so allows them to create industries and jobs, which mean long-term prosperity.

”We are not about charity. This is not about teaching people to fish,” he said, referencing the adage that if you catch a fish for a man, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. ”I’m not interested in teaching people to fish. I am interested in having them build fishing industries.”

Engineers, he said, must wake up to the huge challenges and opportunities that are presented to them. He implored them to travel and spend time working in developing nations, allow the experience to change them and open their eyes to how engineering can change the world.

”We must accept that all 6 billion people on the planet have a right to education, to clean water, to security,” he said. ”And we must help communities build industries that will empower people. This is not a top-down approach. It’s a bottom-up and inside-out approach. If our technology and engineering are only focused on the richest one billion people on Earth, then we are doomed.”

Amadei stressed that the building and infrastructure projects taken on by EWB are meeting vital needs. In Montana’s Crow Nation Reservation, EWB helped residents design and build compressed earth blocks from cement and clay that are now used in building homes. The project spawned two businesses, one that makes the blocks and another company that completes construction. The effort was so successful that EWB was approached by other Native American tribes who want assistance creating something similar. In Afghanistan, EWB worked with residents of a Kabul neighborhood to build an industry manufacturing fuel briquettes. In a country where there’s very little wood for fuel, that project helped employ nearly 20 people and allowed other businesses, like the local baker, to be more productive.

He said that when the next generation of engineers takes part in projects like these, they see firsthand the difference engineering can make in lifting the world from poverty. This humanitarian approach is a moral obligation, not only to the field of engineering, but to the world, Amadei said.

”It is time for us to create global citizens, engineers who care, who can merge matters of the head with matters of the heart.”

— Holly Beretto is a staff writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.