An engi­neer­ing club at Mon­tana State Uni­ver­sity had an immense chal­lenge. Build wells for each of the 58 school dis­tricts in Khwis­ero, Kenya.

The stu­dents had no idea where to start, but have come around to build six wells so far. Future classes of the engi­neer­ing club will con­tinue the work.

From the Boze­man Daily Chron­i­cle, writer Gail Schont­zler describes the joy that one such well brought to a village.

Fresh, clean water gushed from the new water pump, and J.J. Larsen took a drink.

“Obu­layi muno,” which means “very good” in Kiluhya, he said to the Kenyan vil­lagers gath­ered around him. “They all cheered.”

And with that, the peo­ple of Mwisena cel­e­brated their new water well with speeches, danc­ing and a chicken feast.

The well is the sixth installed by stu­dents from the Engi­neers With­out Bor­ders chap­ter at Mon­tana State University.

Larsen, a 27-year-old from Seat­tle who just earned his master’s degree in mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing from MSU, was co-project man­ager this sum­mer. He was one of 19 MSU stu­dents who trav­eled to Kenya to tackle one lit­tle part of the vast prob­lem of poverty in Africa.

The new well is another step toward the MSU stu­dents’ long-term goal of bring­ing clean water to all 58 pri­mary schools in the Khwis­ero dis­trict of west­ern Kenya.

Installing wells means vil­lagers no longer have to drink from muddy water­ing holes that can carry water-borne dis­eases. It means chil­dren, espe­cially girls, no longer have to miss out on hours of school while walk­ing miles to fetch water in cans car­ried on their heads.

“Being a col­lege stu­dent, you can still make a dif­fer­ence some­where in the world,” Larsen said. “That just feels good, feels right.”

The MSU chap­ter of Engi­neers With­out Bor­ders has come a long ways in five years. When the first MSU stu­dents expressed inter­est in 2004, the national EWB handed them a huge assign­ment — answer a plea from Nairobi archi­tect Ronald Omy­onga to help chil­dren in his home dis­trict get clean water and a bet­ter chance at an education.

The stu­dents started from scratch, with no orga­ni­za­tion, no money and no idea where to begin.

Since then, stu­dents have learned a lot — how to get wells drilled, build latrines, col­lab­o­rate with Africans and raise money back home (each well costs $15,000 to $25,000). They have man­aged to build a stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion that keeps going, despite con­stant turnover and grad­u­a­tion, pass­ing on inspi­ra­tion and lessons learned to each new gen­er­a­tion of stu­dent members.

This sum­mer, in addi­tion to one new well, the MSU stu­dents installed two san­i­tary com­post­ing latrines, ran a health clinic, dis­trib­uted 200 eye­glasses, researched a water pipeline sys­tem and over­saw con­struc­tion of the group’s first bio-gas latrine, based on design work done last year by an MSU engi­neer­ing class.

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