Hollidaysburg Area Senior High School junior Jared Wood was as baffled by buildings eerily burnt and pocked from weapons fire as he was awestruck by machete scars on the dark arms of his jovial, Santa Claus-like host, Pastor Alfred Gatabazi.
"People in Rwanda live with reminders of genocide day in and day out," Wood said.
Gatabazi was Wood's age when he received the machete wounds during the Hutus' mass killing of Rwanda's minority ethnic group, the Tutsis, in 1994.
The Christian pastor was eager to welcome Wood, his mother, Cynthia, a Penn State Altoona business administration professor, and four Penn State Altoona students to Rwanda for a week last month.
Human development students collaborated with Gatabazi's church for a class project that resulted in creating a nonprofit organization that provides children with medical care, proper nutrition and education
"We want the children to be sponsored in the short run," student Jo Elle Reilly said. "But ultimately, we want to help the women who watch over them become self-reliant."
Their project is just one of many being spearheaded by students from across the region who apply their education and skills to make lasting differences in communities in developing countries.
Bringing irrigation, electricity
During Penn State senior Kimberly Fiske's three-week-long stay in Nyeri, Kenya, in 2009, she said many people approached her to "just to touch my pale face and blond hair."
Fiske said she did not expect the attention, nor did she expect to see people wearing formal business suits walking down barren dirt roads.
"Even though they may be really poor, it seemed to me that they dressed to present themselves as classy people and should be treated that way," Fiske said.
After many weekly phone interviews with leaders from a Kenyan child empowerment center, she and more than 30 fellow Penn State students spent three weeks constructing simple irrigation and rainwater filtration systems to contribute to the center's water cost saving.
Fiske said she was surprised upon arriving in Nyeri to meet the center's leader, Andrew, who had studied engineering at the university level in Kenya.
"He was one of many brilliant people I met in Kenya," she said.
Penn State international engineering projects - including those in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Belize, Ecuador, Jamaica, Kenya and Tanzania - all depend on natives, such as Andrew, who are ultimately responsible for sustaining them, according to Penn State engineering professor Tom Colledge of Altoona.
One example is a wind-powered electricity generator that Colledge's students constructed to charge cell-phone batteries for 300 Kenyans.
After the University of Nairobi verified the need for electricity, Penn State students spent $700 in grant money to buy fasteners, steel, windmill blades and a wind generator for the project.
Students built the windmill over a two-year period. A contingent of residents living on the shores of Kenya's Lake Victoria has maintained it, Colledge said.
"After three years, the business continues to work and people are still paying 50 cents to recharge their batteries at the windmill," he said.
Prior to the windmill's construction, one man would pedal a bicycle 16 kilometers to a friend's house in another city where he could charge batteries for people's electronics.
That project and dozens of others over the past decade are part of an academic program attracting approximately 45 students each spring to apply their engineering and business skills to improve the lives of people in developing countries.
Fiske recalled a poignant moment standing with a poor, fatherless boy in Kenya as they watched a plane move across the sky.
"Someday," the boy said to her, "someday I will ride that."
Those words were humbling to the Penn State energy engineering student who used her father's frequent flyer miles for her plane ticket to Nyeri.
The work doesn't come without risk.
"Safety is a concern," said Colledge, who was mugged in Kenya during a personal trip to visit the University of Nairobi.
"We don't go anywhere tourists congregate. We keep our heads low, and travel as a group."
Helping children, women
In June, Gatabazi led the Penn State Altoona faculty and students to three communities on the outskirts of Kigali, Rwanda, where 500 women in colorful, though ragged, dresses live in huts against a backdrop of lush, jungle mountains.
Their husbands were killed during the 100-day genocide 17 years ago that resulted in 800,000 lives lost.
The widows of Gatabazi's church shelter and care for 800 orphans.
However, those children don't attend school. Although there are many schools in Rwanda, the children don't have money to pay $20-per-month tuition. Typically, they spend their days begging for food and living on one meal a day. All they own is the clothes on their backs.
The students collaborated with Gatabazi's church to create a nonprofit organization that provides children with medical care, proper nutrition and education.
"We want the children to be sponsored in the short-run," Reilly said. "But ultimately, we want to help the women who watch over them become self-reliant."
Members of the Penn State Altoona business department, including Cynthia Wood, are helping to achieve that long-term goal.
Wood was impressed by the women's ideas to start a sewing and a basket-weaving business to earn money to support the orphans.
"They wove baskets from threads of fabric from grocery store potato sacks to demonstrate their skills for us," Wood said. "Basket weaving is a cultural tradition passed down through the generations."
Through her interviews and research of local tailors, Wood learned the women need two sewing machines to launch their business.
Those machines and basket-weaving supplies cost approximately $1,500, which has been loaned to the women from Penn State Altoona community members.
"We are now researching ways to market the women's sewing business to schools in Kigali, in hopes that they could be contracted to produce school uniforms," Wood said.
The women will earn about $4 a day, but if they are successful, Wood said the children they care for may be able to attend school.
Creating limestone channels
St. Francis University students visited farming communities in Bolivia, South America, last May to apply their engineering knowledge to help remedy rivers plagued with acid-mine drainage that is considered 10,000 times worse than in Pennsylvania.
Over the course of a week, two students and two faculty members - in the university's first international engineering project - helped to reduce the drainage affecting approximately 8,500 people in Bolivian farming communities .
Limestone channels, a method used in reducing Pennsylvania's river pollution, would effectively treat Rio Jackucha water for 30 years, according to St. Francis engineering professor William Strosnider.
The St. Francis team worked alongside indigenous farmers to move 200,000 metric tons of limestone boulders into a highly turbulent Rio Jackucha stream.
It's a simple method to reduce acidity, but tests needed to be conducted to ensure it would work, according to student Kelsea Palmer.
"We needed to know exactly how much limestone we needed because we were working with a fixed budget," Palmer said, referring to $95,000 in donations from various Rotary clubs. The limestone was delivered from a quarry about 20 miles from the site and was moved into the stream by hand and wheel barrow.
Palmer realized the project's impact as she helped to move limestone boulders, some as heavy as 150 pounds. "Pennsylvania has acid-mine pollution," she said, "so it hit home to work with people dealing with the same problem."
The St. Francis team is awaiting water samples from Bolivia in order to assess whether the limestone has changed the water's acidity levels. If results are successful, Bolivian government officials may implement limestone channels throughout the nation, Strosnider said.
Scratching
the surface
Project engineers from St. Francis and Penn State's University Park and Altoona campuses know their projects are works in progress.
Wood intends to return to Rwanda next year with her son and a group of university business students.
"Last month, when we were at the Rwanda airport for our flight home, Pastor Alfred and the women were there to see us off," she said. "We boarded the plane knowing there is still much to be done."
Mirror Staff Writer Russ O'Reilly is at 946-7435.
