Village Empowerment: Service-learning with Continuity

Since 1998, as part of the Village Empowerment Program, a total of 119 students/volunteers from University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and several other universities in engineering and other fields have traveled twice a year to the same network of villages in Peru. Students in service-learning projects in more than 25 different courses have designed and helped install over 80 systems, most running on renewable energy, in 44 villages and towns in the Andes Mountains of Peru for medical clinics, schools, and town halls. The villages in general have no grid electricity, one pay telephone (or none) per village, no space heating, houses made of adobe, and elevations up to 3600 m (11,500 ft.). The indigenous Quechua, or Inca, people in the villages survive on subsistence agriculture. The systems power transceiver radios, lights, computers, vaccine refrigerators, and other medical equipment in clinics as well as laptop computers and lights in schools, mostly utilizing solar energy. Water supply and purification systems for whole towns have been added as well as micro hydro and biogas. To help make all these systems sustainable, we return every six months to the same two networks of villages. We are also helping to start microenterprises of aquaculture, of manufacturing and renting solar lanterns and LED headlamps, of biodigesters, and of developing and manufacturing solar water purification bottles coated with a photo catalyst with a dye indicator. The program has transformed the lives not only of many of the villagers but also of the students and volunteers. Some of the students have changed their life-long professional goals as a result. Many medical personnel have told us repeatedly that our radios have saved many lives. The long term vision is to have a whole university partner with networks of villages to address the many community needs and the learning needs of students in many disciplines in a sustainable way. There is a danger in the apparent popularity in students participating in service projects in developing countries involving “one-shot” designs and installations in which there is no sustained involvement for training, maintenance, and replacement. The importance of continual training of local personnel, of periodic maintenance and adjustment, of learning and redesigning from operating experience cannot be overemphasized.