KenyaConnections

EWB-MSU has been able to send over 100 students to Khwisero since the project began in 2004. While each student has a wholly unique experience throughout their travels, a universal feeling seems to arise as each student’s time in Khwisero nears an end; they feel like they left quite a bit undone. In recognition of [...]

We just passed the Equator in Western Uganda as our team hugs the Congo border and heads to Mbarara to evaluate more schools that have been utilizing Project WET materials. Project WET is a Bozeman-based NGO that works in every U.S. state and in over 50 countries across the globe. Focusing mainly in water and sanitation/hygiene [...]

  It’s comforting to find your counterparts in a foreign place. Throughout my five years at Montana State University I’ve been involved in numerous student organizations and projects that ranged from environmental activism to public policy to international development. I often stretched myself really thin and got burnt out on occasion, but ultimately my involvement [...]

One of the buzz-phrases that Joe Thiel—one of this summer’s EWB-Montana State University’s Project Managers—and I have been throwing around this trip is: “ask and you shall receive.” We’ve been amazed at the ease of moving projects forward and getting access to resources that we may have intuitively thought to be out of reach. While [...]

The “definition” of a word and the “meaning” of a word seem like synonymous terms at first glance. Perplexed as to what an unfamiliar word means, we most often default to the nearest dictionary, appealing blindly to some other authority. It is at this point that our search for meaning often ends and we forgo [...]

It’s odd when good ideas emerge: usually at odd times in odder places. The idea for the EWB-MSU Fellows Program came up on a country-bus somewhere in between Nakuru and Kericho, Kenya. Our organization (Engineers Without Borders – Montana State University) had been working on water and sanitation projects in Khwisero District, Kenya for six [...]

It’s been a few days since I’ve left Nairobi and over the eight-hour bus ride to Khwisero, I couldn’t help but notice how it began: massive turbulence, the result of the Chinese construction of a “super-highway.” According to NPR, the super-highway is the product of collaboration amongst three Chinese companies; it will be 31 miles [...]

Umande Trust; Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya Kibera is East Africa’s largest slum with nearly one million people residing in less than three square miles. Kibera is only one of several informal settlements throughout and surrounding Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. The typical “home” in Kibera is often a single room of approximately 60-150 square feet with walls of [...]

7/08/2011   So it begins: Nairobi. I arrived last evening after a seamless set of flights and, luck would have it, all the bags arrived safely and I made it in almost exactly 25 hours…third time is the charm I suppose. I’m writing from a hostel’s patio while surrounded by a class of students who [...]