Project Trip: A Unique Team with a Unique Project

Now that the children’s homes and trauma rehabilitation programs are becoming established, Watoto is pursuing the design of an agricultural and technical college and training facility. This is where eMi comes in. For about a week and half, 13 professional engineers and architects gathered together from all over the world to do the design. It was such an honor to be a part of this team that has so much experience in so many different fields.

Among several eMi interns and our staff leader John, we had several architects from a firm in Australia, a agricultural engineering professor from Colorado State University, a horticulture/agriculturalist from Massachusetts, a livestock specialist from California, a water/wastewater engineer from Colorado, and a structural engineer with expertise in seismic design from California. Needless to say, there was quite a bit of experience in the team and a knowledge being thrown about in our meetings. The design process was a great learning experience. Here is the team ...

My job for the week was to finish up a few surveying details from when I was there a few weeks ago. Then I was working with the structural engineer to come up with a sufficient structural design that was seismically sound. There is a significant seismic risk in this area of Uganda (we actually felt a small earthquake while we were there) and Watoto’s current construction practice is insufficient to handle any seismic loads. I also served as tour guide around the 450 acre site. Having spent 10 days in Gulu earlier in February, I had gotten to know the site pretty well so I got to lead the other team members around the land to help the find the areas that had good views (for the architects) and the areas that needed soil and water tests (for the engineers).

While the final design is not complete and much work still needs to be done finalizing the details of the design, we got a lot done in the week that we were there. Along with the other interns and some correspondence from our volunteers, I will be helping finalize all the drawings and report to give to Watoto at the end of the semester in June.

The following is the PowerPoint presentation we gave to Watoto at the end of our time there. I just recorded the presentation from the computer without any of our descriptions and the quality isn't the greatest so I hope it makes at least some sense.