Internships

Kasturi Shah ’16

The Princeton University Peru team of Engineers Without Borders has been working to provide water to the small rural village of La Pitajaya, Peru for the past five years. During our partnership with La Pitajaya, we have built two water pipelines; one in the upper part of the community, Alta, and one in the lower part of the community, Baja. These were completed in the summers of 2013 and 2014, respectively. The overall purpose of this past summer’s trip was to conduct maintenance and repairs on the two pipelines, to close out the project in La Pitajaya, and to survey new communities for our next project. During the trip, the team did construction work on both pipelines, making repairs so that the system could function optimally after closing the project. Examples of these repairs included fixing the Alta pipeline source capture and spring box, adding a new user to the Alta system, and widening the Baja source capture to increase the flow of water to the pipeline. The team also conducted technical and qualitative surveys of new communities for our next project. With this summer’s trip, we successfully closed out our project in La Pitajaya, and began planning our project for next year. Ultimately, this project allowed the team to engage in international development work, while gaining hands-on experience in engineering construction and design.