UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

I was a co-lead for the project in La Huaylla, Peru. When I was in the community, my counterpart, Evan Barnell, and I shared responsibilities. He was more technical than I am so he was normally at the construction site and I was either assisting him or leading the team in another part of the project. When Evan did not go to the construction site, I was the construction manager in his place. As a women construction manager, I was not something the contractors and laborers were used to.  EWB members posing after unloading construction materials.  In La Huaylla, women almost never work on constructions sites. Last year, when EWB constructed something in the community for the first time, the contractors and laborers got used to seeing women and men on the construction site. Both last year and this year our teams were half male and half female. Last year we only had one contactor and this year we had two contractors because the scale of the project was much larger. The contract...

Our team was in La Huaylla, Peru for a total of 10 weeks. Each student stayed for 3 - 7 weeks, so we had a total of 4 - 7 students in the community at one time. Once construction of the 80 cubic meter reservoir started, we were on the construction site most days. Usually, half the team would go to the construction site and work on construction management while the other half of the team worked on other parts of the project, such as making lesson plans and filling out paperwork. Before we started construction, the community changed the location of where the reservoir was going to be built. During our trip the year before, we had surveyed the land where we thought the reservoir would be built, however, we did not survey the land that the reservoir was actually going to be built on. We had to measure the soil properties and composition to make sure it could withstand the weight of the reservoir. With the change of location, we did not know we were going to have to measure the soil quality...

This was the second time I’ve visited La Huaylla, Peru and the third time EWB-UC Davis has visited. I was very excited to go back and see all the familiar faces I had not seen since one year before. When we arrived in La Huaylla, we were dragging our suitcases up the dirt path to where we were going to be housed when I heard a scream. Flor, one of the elementary school students we had taught the year before, saw me and ran into my arms for the biggest, longest hug. I had missed her so much and it was very sweet to realize that she had missed us as well. During the first week in La Huaylla, I noticed that the community was treating us with more kindness and familiarity than the years before. When we visited the community last year, we renovated their spring catchment chambers and made a tangible difference in their water supply. By coming back to the community year after year and making a difference, we earned our trust from the community. Semaj playing with the students during the les...