NHS Grad Looking To Join Engineering Project Team In Niger

By John Voket

Whitney Blanchard knows what an immense challenge it will be for her and several other University of New Hampshire engineering graduates to create a community garden and irrigation system on the edge of the Sahara Desert. But she believes it won’t be anywhere near as challenging as raising funds to underwrite the journey as America’s philanthropic attention remains galvanized on Gulf States ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

“I know people will be less interested in donating money to help children in Africa when so many people are suffering from the Katrina disaster,” Ms Blanchard told The Bee during a brief visit home last weekend. “But I’m going, so I’ll have to find the money somehow.”

She has a particular empathy for those who lost so much, especially on the gulf coast of Louisiana because just a few hours before Katrina hit, the Newtown High graduate was evacuated from New Orleans where she had spent the summer interning with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“I was working in the gulf on NOAA’s oil spill response team, and we were staying right in New Orleans,” Ms Blanchard said. “But when it looked certain that we were going to get hit, they got us all out of there.”

During the busy three years since she walked the halls of Newtown High, Ms Blanchard has been extremely busy balancing part-time jobs with her engineering studies, and spending as much time as she could applying her studies in the real world. Besides her work in the Gulf of Mexico, she spent time earning her core engineering credits while performing civil engineering work as part of an exchange program in Edinburgh, Scotland.

And this semester, she served as an orientation leader for incoming UNH freshmen entering the school’s engineering program. In 2003, she and her fellow graduate and undergrad students formed Students Without Borders (SWB), a university chapter of the nonprofit Engineers Without Borders.

“Our mission is to encourage, support, and implement environmentally and economically sustainable technical projects in disadvantaged communities nationally and internationally, while developing globally responsible and knowledgeable students,” she said of the group. This year, Ms Blanchard is also serving as SWB’s vice president.

Since the organization formed, the group has made three service missions to Thailand to implement sustainable water projects and a trip to Indonesia to develop an alternative fresh water supply system in the city of Jakarta. Locally, the group collaborated with the UNH Organic Garden Club to build and produce a sustainable organic garden serving the UNH community.

Now SWB is collaborating with RAIN for the Sahel and the Sahara, another New Hampshire based nonprofit organization. In partnership with Ms Blanchard and her fellow SWB engineering students, RAIN is developing design manuals for tanks and water conveyance systems for the communities of nomadic Taureg people in the Southern Sahara region of Niger, West Africa.

“Our goal over the course of several visits we hope to make to the village of Gougaram is to supply water to support school gardens that supply the children and faculty with fresh food and enough cash crop surplus so they can afford supplies and other necessities for the students,” she said.

According to a report from Engineers Without Borders, since the Tuareg people are nomads, schools by necessity are residential. In the past, the state provided staple food and other essentials, and schools have gardens to provide fresh vegetables for the students.

Over the past 15 years the schools have deteriorated; most receive no food, dormitories have no beds and are often in disrepair, there are no gardens. In 2002, RAIN began to rebuild gardens.

“We began in Gougaram where parents dug a well and RAIN provided a gasoline motor to pump the water. A traditional ditch irrigation system was used,” the report states. “The garden produced enough to provide vegetables for the students and a small cash crop, but did not support itself. The major expense was the cost of fuel for the pump, which ran almost all day.”

With the RAIN garden and other supplies the organization provided, Gougaram school enrollment increased from 69 to 124 in two years. To put this and other schools on the road to sustainability, however, volunteers need to ensure these gardens and initiatives become profitable.

Besides donations Ms Blanchard is hoping to raise between October 1 and 31, she is also planning to write grant applications seeking matching funds and other sources for her project, in order to minimize the amount she feels her project may divert from domestic emergencies.

“We don’t just want to keep going in and doing the work for these children,” she said. “We want to create a pilot system that will be self-sustaining and duplicated in many other villages and communities in that desert region.”

While Ms Blanchard works toward her fundraising goal in October, her father Kirk, a retired engineer himself and an active volunteer with the Dodgingtown Fire Department will be working in New Orleans as part of a contingent of Connecticut Red Cross chapter representatives sent there to lend assistance and expertise to the recovery effort.

Anyone interested in making a donation to help Ms Blanchard complete her SWB service mission to Niger can send a check to Students Without Borders – Whitney Blanchard, 3884 Granite Square Station, Durham NH 03824. To learn more about the program, visit www.unh.edu/ewb/index.