Peru Study Abroad 2013: Just the beginning

For those of you paying attention, you'll know that I recently started the summer with a little trip out of the country. For two weeks starting April 27 I had the privilege of visiting the wonderful country of Peru during a Study Abroad class at Brigham Young University. It was probably my two of my favorite weeks in the approximately 1048 weeks I've been living on this beautiful planet. Because I haven't shared a lot about the time I spent their with many people (ok ok, I've told pretty much no one anything) I thought I'd try and recapture the experience in a series of blogposts, approximately one for each day I was there. By the end I will have an eternal record of the expereince, and hopefully you'll have enjoyed reliving the experience with me (and possibly thought about something new along the way!). So stay tuned for the adventure, but first a little background....

Dr. Lewis, Photo from BYU 

Meet Dr. Lewis: the awesome chair of the chemical engineering department at BYU. He also happens to teach a class nicknamed GEO. GEO stands for Global Engineering Outreach (interested in learning more? visit the club website here.). This class involves multiple engineering disciplines and gives students the opportunity to work in groups on humanitarian projects for third world countries.

But not any sort of humanitarian projects, the kind that NEED engineers. The kind where a team is told "people on the Uros islands would like to bake their own bread every morning", "every year hundreds of thousands die of causes related to biomass cookstoves", "people on the Uros islands spend several days every couple of weeks cutting reeds to keep their islands floating", or "women on the islands spend several hours everyday bent over a washboard partially in the lake to clean their clothes". The team is then asked, "how do we help?"

Flight map from the airplane as we flew from Houston to Lima.

So from August 2012 to April 2013 the 20 members of the GEO class have put their brains to work trying to answer that question. The knowledge and experience that came out of those long 8 months was then carried more than 4,000 miles from Provo, Utah to the cities of Cusco and Puno, Peru. Once there we did our best to teach the people in Peru what we had learned, and learn from them as we built and implemented prototype designs aimed at answering the question.

That's the synopsis of the crew from the GEO class of 2013.

I'll try and post once a day about one day from the trip. Some are significantly more exciting than others, so I'll at least try and make those that are less eventful more insightful. We'll see...as should be stated often I am majoring in Mechanical Engineering, not English. I am not even sure what the word prose means...