Cultural Bridge

MSOE students take training to Guatemala

By Joe Grundle

Members of MSOE's bridge-building team sit with several Guatemalans atop the partially completed bridge. Photo courtesy of Jill Stephany

When one of the world’s 10 deadliest snakes slinks into your construction site, leave.

That was one of many things a group of six Milwaukee School of Engineering students learned over their spring break while constructing a bridge for a Guatemalan village.

During excavation of the bridge site, an extremely venomous cantil snake crawled into the river during the dig. The local villagers working on the project promptly hopped out of the river and urged the students to do the same.

“They told us, ‘If it bites you once, you die,’” said Jill Stephany, leader of the student group that traveled to La Providencia, Guatemala, to build the bridge as part of the Engineers Without Borders program.

“As a general rule of thumb, if the Guatemalans run, you should run to,” added Nate Theobald, a sophomore who joined fellow MSOE students Eric Brill, Lydia Olson, Dave Ferguson and Amanda Wilson on the project.

Bridge construction manager Mike Paddock, a design project manager for the Marquette Interchange and a senior project manager for CH2M Hill of Milwaukee, didn’t get the memo.

“I was still in the water and didn’t realize until later that it was one of the 10 deadliest snakes in the world,” Paddock said. “These [local workers] were pretty tough guys that come from a macho society. But when that snake went in the water, they hopped out and looked very concerned.”

Cathy Paddock (back left), wife of CH2M Hill's Mike Paddock, and Jill Stephany (back right) pose with four Guatemalans who helped build the bridge. Photo courtesy of Jill Stephany

La Providencia is a small village of indigenous Mayans in Guatemala. It has no electricity or running water, and there are no roads connecting the village to the nearest highway, which is 500 yards away.

To reach the highway, villagers walked through a dense jungle, crossed a fast-moving river with rocky banks and kept one eye out for the snakes while transporting supplies and goods along a narrow foot path.

That all changed when the students — under the supervision of Paddock, president of the Wisconsin Professionals Chapter of Engineers Without Borders, and Doug Stahl, MSOE associate professor — teamed up with the villagers to build a reinforced concrete bridge over the river separating La Providencia from the main road.

The bridge, which the students designed, supports truck traffic and opened the village to a world that was just beyond its fingertips.

“I was down there when the river was much higher, and from August to November, it is virtually impassable,” said Paddock, who has worked on several projects in Guatemala and Bolivia for WP-EWB, a nonprofit organization that builds infrastructure in developing countries. “That was very frustrating to the villagers. They had a paved highway just 100 yards [from the river], but teachers could not make it in, and students could not go to the junior high school.

A Guatemalan bridge worker joins his wife and three children at the post-build party. Photo courtesy of Jill Stephany

“Also, if people needed medical attention for snakebites or births, they could not leave, nor could medical personnel come to them.”

Even at the end of the dry season, when the river was at its lowest point, crossing it on foot was treacherous, Stephany said.

“It’s not a river that would be easily waded through,” she said. “It’s moving so fast; it would be easy to get swept off your feet.”

Stephany was turned onto the project last year when she called WP-EWB to look into participating in the organization.

Paddock suggested Stephany start an EWB student chapter at MSOE. She jumped at the chance and recruited about 10 students at an initial meeting. While MSOE refused to officially recognize or contribute to the group for liability reasons, the majority of students stuck with it, and the club was born.

Now, all it needed was a project.

Paddock, meanwhile, learned of La Providencia’s need for a bridge while he was working on a different project for Marquette University in San Lucas Toliman, a Guatemalan town of about 17,000 people. Upon his return, he told Stephany that if she was interested, WP-EWB would assist her student group with the bridge’s design and construction.

“This is a good first project for a chapter,” Paddock said. “It was easy to arrange because we had ties to the mission in San Lucas [where the students stayed during their trip], and Lake Atitlan is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, so it gets the excitement up.

MSOE students Amanda Wilson (left) and Jill Stephany (right) relax at the post-build party with a villager who worked on the bridge every day. Photo courtesy of Jill Stephany

“Frankly, I don’t think this group needed the extra encouragement. They would have done anything to help people.”

The students accepted Paddock’s offer, but before they went to Guatemala, they had to design the bridge. They designed a 16-foot-by-16-foot box-culvert bridge with the help of MSOE’s Stahl; club mentor Audrey Miller, a professional engineer with Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation; Angela Reifenberger, an engineer with CH2M Hill; and Jake Peterson and Tony Corners, two MSOE students who didn’t make the trip to Guatemala.

“The reason to do a box-culvert [in an area that may be difficult to excavate] is that it does not have any isolation footings, so it is a bit more forgiving if you have uneven ground,” said Stahl.

Using rainfall data gathered in Guatemala, the students did a hydrological study to determine how much flow the bridge would need to handle and then added 25 percent just to be sure.

After finishing the design, the students raised more than $14,000 for bridge materials and travel fees. Milwaukee’s Alterra Coffee donated some proceeds from its Guatemalan coffee sales, and Miller acquired grant money.

Meanwhile, Paddock worked closely with the local Guatemalan government to make sure materials and conditions for the bridge construction were ready to go when the students arrived at the mission in San Lucas Toliman on April 13.

“It’s always a little bit of a culture shock when a group comes with me for the first time because it doesn’t look or feel like home,” said Paddock.

Jill Stephany (left) takes a break with Raul Lec, a member of the San Lucas Toliman Mission Committee, which coordinates local projects. Photo courtesy of Jill Stephany

But MSOE’s Theobald said he was just as shocked by the prep work. The Guatemalans used machetes to cut a roadway through the jungle, allowing materials to get through.

Stahl said the villagers carried loads of sand and stone and 400 sacks of cement in from the highway to the bridge site. They also built bodegas to house the materials and completely dug out a diversion channel for the river.

“We thought we would spend at least a day cleaning that up, but it was all done when we got there,” he said.

Theobald said it was a good sign the villagers showed such a strong, early commitment to the bridge, as the most important factor to the success of EWB projects is community involvement.

“It’s not our project,” he said. “By working on the bridge with us and being such an integral part of the implementation, that bridge is theirs now.”

Overall, construction went well, but there were obstacles, including excavating washing machine-sized boulders from the site without the use of heavy machinery.

“We used large pry bars to move most of the boulders,” Paddock said. “It took three days for a local rock splitter using metal chisels and a sledgehammer to break down the biggest boulder into pieces light enough to move.”

He said another challenge on the Guatemalan bridge was adjusting to an absolutely different mindset and approach than he regularly uses on Wisconsin jobs.

“The thing I like about these EWB projects is you have to go back to the fundamentals of engineering because you don’t have the technology or materials to fall back on,” he said.

“I think it’s the perfect capstone to young engineers who are nearing graduation.”

But it could only be a perfect capstone if the team could finish the project. It got dicey with the rainy season approaching, but the weather cooperated and the team stayed ahead of schedule. The students built not only the bridge but also two of the four wing walls for the project, an opportunity that let them show the villagers how to construct the remaining two.

And so, after 11 days of manually digging, cutting and bending rebar, pouring concrete and dodging snakes, the bridge was finished, and the students returned to Milwaukee, tired but gratified.

Stephany, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering, said it was important for her to see how materials she will use in designs are put together. She also discovered that work on a construction site doesn’t always go as planned.

“It definitely helps you understand why you have to be flexible,” she said.

Theobald agreed the trip was overwhelmingly worthwhile in terms of gaining experience and getting a chance to use his studies.

“Just being outside of the classroom and doing something good with what little knowledge I could apply was really nice,” he said.

“It was good to see the engineering work in action. So much of it is usually staring at my computer and scribbling notes.”

While the project was a success for both the students and villagers, Stephany said the group got much more out of it personally than professionally.

“I’ve rarely felt so useful in my life as when I was down there,” she said.