“It took us about three hours to walk to the spring where they get water, and I could barely walk the next day,” said James Crawford, an Environmental Engineering major from Fort Lauderdale and the president of UCF Engineers Without Borders. “Carrying a five-gallon bucket of water, it takes six or seven hours, and it’s mostly women and children who get the water. They walk miles and miles all over the place just to bring water to their houses.”
The students plan to build a water catchment system that will take water from the roofs of two community buildings and store it in oversized cisterns. The project is the first international venture for UCF’s Engineers Without Borders chapter. The students chose the Haiti project because they wanted to help a country that is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and that has a large immigrant population in Central Florida.