Spring Break in El Salvador

Had there been one, the travel brochure might have gone something like this: Spring Break in El Salvador. Hard work, no pay, filthy water and bring your bug spray.

And still a half dozen Rowan students and an engineering professor would have signed up.

Brochure or no, six Rowan students and Dr. Jess Everett, professor of civil and environmental engineering, flew to El Salvador in March to help residents of a small, impoverished Central American village acquire the most basic of human services - clean drinking water.

"I was expecting the worst and it was pretty rough," said Joanna Reyes, 22, an elementary ed major from Sayreville. "We didn't have beds, just mattresses with bug nets. We bathed in the river but it's not like you ever really came out clean."

The group, a contingent of Engineers Without Borders, an international relief organization, traveled to El Salvador the third week of March as a follow up to a May 2007 excursion to the town of La Ceiba.

The first trip enabled students to survey residents of La Ceiba, a town of about 500, on a range of issues related to water quality and health. The March trip focused on water testing, evaluation and developing a plan to correct the fetid water supply.

Testing confirmed that the local water, pumped from hand-dug wells, was contaminated by seeping human waste. The water was sickening residents and resulted in the deaths of some three-dozen children the past 10 years.

"We found the water contained high levels of fecal coliform bacteria," said junior Keicha Muriel, 20, a civil engineering major from Camden. "In drinking water there should be none."

Senior civil engineering major Karl Martinsen, 22, of New Milford, said the team found no basic safeguards in place to protect water sources from groundwater runoff and waste water and devised a plan to rectify the problem.

The plan calls for deep, mechanically drilled wells from which water will be pumped to holding tanks where it will be chlorinated and purified. Residents will then access the water from a dozen spigots placed around the village.

Rowan's Engineers Without Borders group, which is funded in part by corporate sponsorships from Lockheed Martin, Johnson & Johnson, the Rowan Foundation and others, is arranging for El Salvadoran companies to implement its plan.

"We're estimating the final cost to be around $25,000," said Jesse Kidd, 21, a senior civil engineering major from Pennsville. "We'll cover the whole cost of implementing the system and it will cost them about $2 a month to keep it going."

Shawn Sacks, 21, a junior civil engineering major from West Berlin, said the group had fun despite the harsh conditions in La Ceiba. Taking a day off, they traveled to a national park and took a 30-minute hike to a waterfall.

Reyes said her teacher training helped in explaining to La Ceiba residents why it's so important to correct their unsanitary water supply.

"A big part of our trip was to educate them," she said. "We went to each house and explained what's going on. Everyone seemed to think if it's natural, it's fresh. We had to explain that, no, it's dirty."