On March 15, three Wichita State students will travel, along with a professional mentor from Nebraska, to Uganda to assess the needs of St. John’s Primary School.

The students are members of a student organization called Engineers Without Borders (EWB), which assembles members with a goal of designing and implementing projects outside the United States.

“We’re all students,” said Milo Pham, marketing chair for EWB. “Why do we have to wait until we grow up and have the money [to] start helping everybody around us?”

But “helping” hasn’t always been easy for EWB. Before the organization’s current project in Uganda, EWB had trouble financing another project in Guatemala, where they focused their efforts on building a school.

“We did not expect [the Guatemala project] to be nearly as expensive as it was going to be,” said Ernesto Cisneros, former president of EWB.

Cisneros was EWB president for 18 months, and said the school had unforeseen complications — seismic activity in the area the school was supposed to be built.

Fixing the design to ensure the structural integrity of the building nearly tripled the cost of a typical EWB project.

“We could have started breaking ground, but we decided to wait until we had more money,” Cisneros said. “We didn’t want to leave a project halfway finished.”

The final price for the Guatemala project was more than $120,000, and the project was dropped after EWB was unable to raise the funds quickly.

“$120,000 over the course of five years,” Seham Alyan, president of EWB, said, “I don’t think that’s not feasible. We just didn’t have the support and pathways we needed to make that happen.”

Alyan said their next goal is to become a department organization for the College of Engineering. Once that happens, she said EWB could establish donation channels through the WSU Foundation.

For now, Alyan and Cisneros have been applying for grants to pay for the new project in Uganda. They have also paired up with a fellow EWB chapter in Omaha, Nebraska.

“They were planning on closing out their Uganda program,” Alyan said of the Omaha chapter. The WSU chapter had been trying to adopt a project in Uganda, but couldn’t find mentors willing to travel.

“We ended up filling in the gaps for each other and merged on the program. We couldn’t adopt a program on our own. It was a beautiful coupling of two needs,” she said.

The new Uganda project is more cost-effective for the WSU chapter, Alyan said. The venture is rainwater harvesting.

The assessment trip EWB is taking in March will allow the group to assess, specifically, St. John’s Primary school. From there they will begin the design processes and attempt to raise money necessary to complete the project.

Alyan said children in the area take turns gathering water during the school day. Every day one child has the two-hour task of gathering river water and bringing it back to the school.

“The ultimate goal is to impact public health by providing clean water to these rural communities,” Alyan said.

Cisneros and Alyan agreed most projects take approximately five years to complete. The Uganda project, for the WSU chapter, is still in its first year.

“The biggest thing is,” Alyan said, “if we fail, we don’t just fail ourselves. We fail an entire community.”