Founded by two University of Waterloo Engineering students, Engineers Without Borders now has 45,000 members. Staff and volunteers in Canada and Africa work to fight poverty in struggling communities.
James Ehrman packed his bags last May and headed to a place far from the haunting beauty of the Tantramar Marsh outside his home in Sackville, N.B.
Ehrman, a second-year environmental engineering student at the University of Waterloo, landed in Ghana, Africa. For the next four months, he stayed in the northern part of the country, and worked with farmers on a junior fellowship with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Canada.
He came back in August with two important convictions: He made the right choice in skewing his studies toward agriculture; and stress isn’t worth keeping.
“I find it’s harder for me to get worked up,’’ says Ehrman. “Because there are so many things in Ghana that are completely out of your control.”
Roots on campus
EWB Canada wasn’t much more than a well-meaning concept 12 years ago when it was founded as a poverty-fighting measure by Waterloo engineering students George Roter and Parker Mitchell.
Today, it has 45,000 members across the country, paid staff and volunteer programs in Canada and Africa. Locally, EWB Canada has a University of Waterloo chapter and a Grand River chapter.
Ehrman worked with an EWB employee on a project sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency, helping farmers improve soil conditions and fight erosion.
Friend and fellow engineering student Zac Young is on another EWB junior fellowship posting through EWB Canada. He left in August to join a non-government agency in Zambia, doing something his entrepreneurial peers in Waterloo’s innovative engineering culture would find familiar.
He engages post-secondary Zambian students in design competitions and professional development programs. In October, he helped organize a two-day competition involving 100 students.
By challenging the students with real-world problems, Young says in an email, the hope is “they will carry that forward to their career . . .to solve Zambia's technical challenges.”
Young, who is his second year of the nanotechnology program, returns in December.
“I think having the experience working in a new cultural space has opened me up to pushing my sights global,’’ he says.
