As part of the EIL Global Awareness Programme Awards, Nicola Corless and I went volunteering in Guatemala for eight weeks last summer. Nicola is a journalist with a local newspaper in Ennis and my own background is a BEng in Manufacturing Engineering and an MSc in Sustainable Development. I am currently setting up an environmental education company in Dublin. Together, we brought diverse backgrounds and a passion for change to the placement. The programme was a funded scholarship where we would spend one week at a Spanish school near Antigua, six weeks working at a forest park in the Guatemalan highlands near Lake Atitlan and one week with a British charity working on sea turtle conservation by the Pacific coast. The aim of the programme was to learn about life, culture and sustainable development in Guatemala and raise awareness of sustainable development in Ireland upon our return. The first ten days were spent in a small town called Santa Lucia Milpas Atlas, where the INLEXCA Language School is based, the host organisation of our placement. Completing four days of Spanish classes through Spanish was difficult at times but enjoyable. However, the next part of the adventure was to prove challenging – six weeks living and working in the quiet little town of El Novillero, where not only was Spanish spoken but also a local Mayan language called K'iche. El Novillero is a town some 2,700 m in the highlands of Guatemala, a friendly Mayan community where farming is one of the main sources of income, mainly growing maize and vegetables for consumption and sale. Our work placement was in an eco tourist forest park called Corazón Del Bosque, meaning ‘heart of the forest’, a community initiative to promote eco tourism and forestation. DIFFICULT TOPOGRAPHY [caption id="attachment_11939" align="alignright" width="3648"] The finished, painted playground[/caption] The topography in the Guatemalan highlands is extremely steep and, since farming is one of the main means of income, many trees are cut down to make way for growing. However, with a six-month rainy season, landslides are not uncommon, leading to weakened soil and ruined farms and livelihoods. Corazón Del Bosque plants trees to benefit the air and soil and the resultant forest park acts as tourist attraction with a hike that offers a challenging workout and beautiful views of the Highlands. To determine our work for the six-week placement, we hiked the park and observed a number of areas we thought could be potential projects such as making child-friendly bins, better signage, environmental education classes and rainwater harvesting to use for irrigation, to name a few. During our placement, we undertook a number of projects. Our initial task involved painting the children's playground; it had not been painted since the park had been opened and was in need of repair. It is also the first view tourists have of the park upon entering, so the paint job gave it a fresh and more inviting look. The second project was to paint and erect signs to guide visitors around the hike and to advise about fines for littering. [caption id="attachment_11934" align="alignright" width="3648"] Rubbish and polluted water is a common sight[/caption] Litter is a big issue in Guatemala. In our first week, we visited the local dump where we saw people who live there in the hope of making money from the waste, a desperate and dangerous living. We also went to visit a river that no longer can sustain fish due to pollution, mainly rubbish, sewage and waste from local leather industry. Rubbish is not seen as ugliness – many people threw waste out of the windows of buses, around areas they ate (the park provides a number of BBQ areas) or on the side of the road. The environmental pollution and the damage to the health of soil, mammals and humans is not understood by many. One of the next projects the park hopes to implement is to produce bins with lids, as the current bins were uncovered and could be accessed by local dogs and to make bins that would appeal to children, to raise their awareness of the use of bins and how they benefit them, their community and the environment. RAINWATER HARVESTER The final project we undertook was to build a rainwater harvester. This was a big undertaking and required many hours of internet research and contacting Guatemalan-based and international experts. We did acquire a multilingual handbook on the construction of a cement, over ground, tapped harvesting unit, however we decided that while this project was achievable it would require much more than the short time we had to complete it. Sometimes, the best decision is to move on from a well research project and develop a plan B. Our plan B was to build a rainwater harvesting system using a plastic tank. For volunteering to work successfully, both the volunteers and the host placement organisation need to be partners; this takes away from the traditional paternalistic North to South aid and is about co-training and cross-cultureal learning. Taking this approach makes the implemented initiatives much more sustainable. The management at Corazón Del Bosque provided the rainwater tank and from generous donors in Ireland, Nicola and I provided payment for the materials to complete the system. We bought as many of the materials possible in the local hardware shops to assist the local economy. The project was relatively simple on paper but, with limited resources, it proved difficult in practice. The land where it was decided to place the system was overgrown and sloped; this needed to be cleaned, levelled and tiered. Following this, we built a stand for the tank and began to construct the system. The system consists of 3" pipes attached to three existing gutters from sloped buildings housing rabbits (a local delicacy); the pipes are attached to each other before being guided to a filter system which handles the first flush. This is necessary to ensure that the water that ends up in the tank is clean and free of debris such as leaves, twigs and insects. [caption id="attachment_11937" align="alignright" width="2448"] Elaine Doyle and the finished tank[/caption] This filtration system was the simplest we could find but proved difficult to fit out with the materials we had access to and we spent many days trailing hardware shops to make this filter a reality. The initial rainwater is guided to the filter, a 6" pipe. Once this pipe is full, a float rises and blocks the entrance to the filter; the rest of water is led to the tapped tank where it could be used for irrigation and other uses but not for consumption. The managing director of the park sees the rainwater harvesting unit as a co-produced, co-funded prototype project that can be reproduced in the forest park and also be used as a feature in environmental tours on site. The park also houses a hydroelectric power station, a project that was started by another Irish volunteer five years ago. Unfortunately, due to monetary reasons, the station was not working at the time of our visit. CONCLUSION Our project was practical, sustainable and challenging, all the ingredients of a great engineering project. It required a lot of physical work, sourcing materials, research and problem solving to make it the reality of which we were very proud. Engineering occurs in many forms, but to work on site on sustainable development projects in a developing country with limited language and resources was an amazing experience – frustrating at times, but a lot of fun. The project illustrates how using a cross cultural, collaboration approach we can help each other globally to find sustainable solutions.