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Scholl Family Supports Engineers Without Borders

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Tom Scholl with his family.

In west Africa, women in villages around the town of Dissin in Burkina Faso draw their water from wells with hand pumps. In the dry season, crops can be grown only with irrigation, but hand pumping is impractical to maintain even subsistence gardens. This leaves the food situation bleak during those months. A solar energy retrofit to that pump, however, could change the picture radically, and that is the goal of the next University of Maryland Engineers Without Borders (EWB) project. The Scholl Family Foundation has stepped forward with a $25,000 gift to the EWB chapter to support the solar-powered pump project. Their gift, made jointly by parents, Tom and Susan Scholl, and sons, William and Tommy, will buy materials essential to the project, and send nine EWB students, one supervising faculty member and one practicing engineer to Dissin to build the project they designed at the Clark School. EWB members will work with the villagers to construct the system, adapting it to their needs and to the practical constraints of a harsh environment. The team, drawn from four engineering majors (mechanical, civil, bioengineering, and electrical and computer), and one student from math and economics, is grappling with design issues that must balance effectiveness with appropriate sustainable technology. "It is a case of engineering used to address the most basic needs of the poor, of Clark School students understanding their capacity and responsibility to be world citizens, and of a gift that provides the means to accomplish it," said EWB faculty advisor Deborah Goodings, professor of civil and environmental engineering. To learn more about the Great Expectations campaign and how you can make a difference in the Clark School's progress, please contact Stu Stabley

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Published April 21, 2008