ITHACA, N.Y. -- Shawhin Roudbari, a graduate student in Cornell University's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working to help rural communities in South Africa hold on to more of their precious resource of water, which appears only briefly in late summer, leaving dry farmland when winter returns. He is one of six EWF-USA volunteers who are using their engineering skills to make a difference overseas this summer.

He is spending three months designing and building rainwater storage tanks and installing them in eight villages, supported by a partnership of the International Water Management Institute, a research organization headquartered in Sri Lanka, and Engineers Without Frontiers USA (EWF-USA), a two-year-old national nonprofit group based at Cornell and supported by the university.

Capturing rainwater from a roof through a simple technique called rainwater harvesting produces enough water to maintain a garden throughout the dry season, says Roudbari.

Instead of putting pencil to paper in their classrooms, the students are putting hammer to nail in countries from South Africa to Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the process, they are learning how community service engineering projects, sometimes resulting in simple and inexpensive devices, can be a force for social change, particularly in the developing and crisis-torn parts of the world.

"Projects are not just focusing on engineering, and the solutions are not just technical," says EWF-USA executive director Regina Clewlow. The insights of anthropologists and political scientists, for example, can put a community's technical needs into the broader context needed to devise holistic solutions, she says.

More than 30 students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Cornell and other institutions have had their internships and projects funded by EWF- USA. The office supports 27 university chapters, including one at Cornell, representing 400 students across the United States. Clewlow, who finished her master of engineering degree at Cornell in 2002, co-founded the organization with Krishna S. Athreya, director of Minority and Women's Programs in Engineering at Cornell. The U.S. affiliate is supported by the university's College of Engineering, Einaudi Center for International Studies and Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy.

EWF-USA is an offshoot of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a Canadian organization founded by two students at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in 2000 on the model of the French medical relief organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). EWB has grown from a handful of students into an international organization with 2,500 members.

Appropriately, Cornell, as the home of the U.S. organization and a student chapter, has made community-service technology an academic course and this spring offered it for credit through the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Students in the class worked on two projects, one helping the local Tompkins County library develop technology to make library resources accessible to patrons with low vision.

"We really try to make sure that it's an academic experience," says Rachel Davidson, the assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who co-taught the course, which is to be offered every semester. "Volunteers get a lot more out of the experience if they reflect on it."

From Sept. 17 to 20, around the time Roudbari's water tanks in South Africa will get their first taste of rain, Cornell will host EWF-USA's first national conference, "Bridging the Divide." About 200 students and professionals from around the globe are expected to attend.

The conference will combine technical workshops with lectures by a diverse set of speakers, including Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, and Patricia Galloway, president-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

To the students who have journeyed to distant places to share knowledge, the experience has been more than just another engineering project. In Tuzla, Bosnia, Douglas Mitarotonda, a Cornell computer science graduate student, is teaching programming and helping develop a Web site for local government, businesses and nongovernmental organizations. He writes in an e-mail: "I think the biggest surprise that I have found is how optimistic people are here . . . . there is not a strong feeling of hate and anger. People are just trying to move on with life."

Written by Kate Becker, Cornell News Service, science-writer intern.

Related World Wide Web sites: The following site provides additional information on this news release. It is not part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over its content or availability.

o EWF-USA: http://www.ewf-usa.org