Engineers Without Borders

God's Child Association, Guatemala

In 2007, Engineers Without Borders at Washington University established a relationship with the God's Child Project, based out of North Dakota, to offer assistance in designing the housing the organization builds for rural Guatemalan families outside of Antigua, Guatemala. 

The God's Child Project provides education for several hundred Guatemalan children in the city of Antigua.  These children, most of whom are exceptionally poor and unable to enroll in the free education system due to an inability to buy school supplies or an uncooperative family, receive free education at the Dreamer Center.  In addition to providing educational services, the organization organizes volunteer teams to travel from the US and perform various construction projects in the surrounding area.  A frequent task is the building of one-room houses with concrete foundations, a luxury for many rural Guatemalan families.  These houses were designed by Dale Besterfield, P.E., a St. Louis-native Civil Engineer.

EWB-Wash U hosted a student housing design competition in Spring of 2007 to maximize the efficiency and strength of this design and increase its earthquake resistance.  The winning design was chosen and incorporated into a revised house design.  In the Summer of 2007, EWB traveled to Guatemala and built several prototype houses, as well as a Rocket-Lorena cookstove.

Both designs were well received, however the cookstove stood out as the true winner- with its ability to immediately solve the health problems faced by hundreds of thousands of  rural Guatemalan women and children who cook indoors, the God's Child Project is now using this design alongside all of its new housing projects and by itself on other sites!  Optimization of this cookstove design continues at Washington University, please see here for more information.