Nyambogo to be Sponsored by Global Fast

Global Fast is an new non-profit that connects people with worthwhile causes, while changing the way they think about donating.  While most nonprofits only ask you to give up part of your paycheck, Global Fast advocates for sacrificial giving. By giving something up, whether a meal, a movie, or that new t-shirt you've been wanting to buy, you now have money in your budget to donate instead, building solidarity with those we aim to help.

Our Nyambogo water project has been vetted by the Global Fast staff and selected as one of the benificiary projects.  Members of the UC community, including the service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega & University Honors Association, will be partnering with EWB to run a Global Fast at UC.  In the coming weeks, look for events and other publicity aimed to engage all of UC in this fast, all earning money for Nyambogo's new water system.

 Click here to visit the Nyambogo project page on GlobalFast.org

Screen Print is ready for Future Cities!

Hey everybody!

Local outreach is new to EWB-UC. Currently, the Education Committee (a new section of our chapter) has completed talks with William Howard Taft Elementary. We are officially one of their weekly after school programs! And what are we doing, do you ask? This after school program is going to focus around the pillars of our group, but also around a national competition - Future Cities (http://www.futurecity.org/). This national competition for 6th, 7th, and 8th graders challenges students to envision their ideal city of the future. Many schools from around the nation will compete in regional competitions which must showcase a digital rendering of the city, an engineering report, and the presentation of a scale 3D model of a section of the city! We are very excited to have our first ever Future Cities after school program meeting this Tuesday, February 1st. To better help the students recognize us, we will all have program shirts to wear to every meeting. EWB uses an interesting style of t-shirt printing - sustainable and creative, of course! Screen printing, just as was used with our EWB chapter shirts, gives us a template which can be used over and over - and we can choose as many color combinations as we'd like!

Look for posts on progress of Future Cities: Sustainable Design By Children, EWB's first ever after school program initiative in the near future!

Otho Abwao Status

Hello All!

As we enter the meat of the winter quarter, the Otho Abwao project is looking forward to exciting progress. Our team has been hard at work defining and selecting building concepts and rendering them in Solidworks. Exciting progress from last quarter saw the arrival of several informative documents from Kenya, including example technical drawings from a local contractor and a set of public school classroom regulations per the Kenyan Ministry of Education. These documents will aid us greatly this quarter as we continue design work.

We have made our final concept choices and will spend the next few months forming our specifications. This will entail fully-defined CAD drawings, load calculations, written specifications, and the like. We are working to partner with the Walsh Group, a construction management contracting company, to obtain assistance with our CAD drawings. Our next step is to present our initial models to the Walsh Group and begin more exact CAD drawings in order to spec out the foundation and walls. We're always looking for more engaged team members, so feel free to come out to any EWB gathering and see what we're all about!

Progress in Nyambogo

Greetings! Over the last quarter and break the members of the Nyambogo design project have been hard at work. Last quarter's attendance at our committee meetings was incredible and the extra help has been quite a boost to the project. We're currently fully invested in determining the best solution for the water storage that will be part of our design. Last quarter we evaluated boreholes and water catchments as the two most feasible sources. Water catchment was given second priority due to its limited ability to supply during the dry season. This drawback would require massive storage capacities in order to ensure availability during the dry season. The borehole offers year round water availability, so the amount of water storage required at any one time would be greatly reduced. This quarter's work involves investigation of types of tanks from large ferrocement tanks to smaller prefabricated plastic tanks. Spring quarter will focus on the incorporation of filter technology as well as planning distribution sites throughout the community.

Burere Update

Over the break the Burere project has been looking over documentation from VLOP and researching information about materials, building techniques, and the government in Tanzania. Before break we contacted THP Limited, Inc. to help us with the structural issues with our first design. This quarter we will be continuing to communicate with THP and figure out exactly what we need to do on the assessment trip this summer.