When junior Allison Schuster began her life at Tufts, she was a dual-degree student pursuing ceramics, drawing and painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Today, she is a political science major gaining engineering knowledge and leading a long-term sustainable development initiative in El Salvador through her presidency of the Tufts chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB).
Schuster first came to know EWB when, after graduating from her New Hampshire high school, she spent six months in El Salvador before coming to college.
"I was really interested in doing some learning outside of the classroom before starting college," she said.
Schuster split her time in El Salvador between homes with two former Peace Corps volunteers and an El Salvadoran family, working with local schools, building for Habitat for Humanity and contributing to an Engineers Without Borders water project. She came to consider her work on the water project her most significant experience there.
"At the point where I met the [EWB] engineers, I had been in El Salvador for four months. I had become pretty overwhelmed by the fact that an underdeveloped country is underdeveloped in just about every way," Schuster said. The EWB water project, she said, seemed to have an effective approach to tackling sustainable development.
"It had such an impact on the community," she said. "Portable drinking water was a very easy first step and had significant implications."
When Schuster arrived at Tufts, she noticed a sign for a Tufts chapter of EWB, a relatively new student group supported by the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public service, the Institute for Global Leadership, and the School of Engineering.
Schuster found that the group, which had just returned from Tibet, was looking for new projects. Schuster immediately contacted the Peace Corps volunteers with whom she had lived in El Salvador for help finding a project that was within the capacity of a student group. She settled on a water pump project based in Arada Vieja, El Salvador, a town she had come to know well during her time in the country. Most of its residents were subsistence farmers, and no one had access to electricity or running water.
The proposal passed, and the first-year liberal arts major found herself at the helm of a complicated engineering project.
"I had no engineering background," she said. "I was running meetings as a freshman who really had no idea what was going on!"
Schuster went back down to El Salvador that January to get more site information, and she and other members of the group embarked upon a formal site assessment in the summer of 2006. They implemented the project in January of 2007.
The group built three community-scale, slow-sand water filters that would bring clean water to 120 people, learning as they went along with help from other EWB chapters and faculty advisors at Tufts. The project involved a great deal of problem-solving in the field, according to Schuster.
"No one's ever built water filters in Arada Vieja, so the hardest part is learning how to do that once you're there," she said.
The implementation was truly a community effort, Schuster said, beginning with its inception. The idea to build a water pump initially came from the local community, with whom Schuster and her team stayed in close contact throughout the project.
"We were working together [with community members] the whole time," she said, adding that each team member lives with a local family during the project.
Schuster and her group also worked to establish a local Water Board to handle governance and decision-making regarding the water pumps.
The timeframe of the Arada Vieja EWB project is three to five years, Schuster said. Follow-up trips are planned for this coming winter break and next summer.
"In some ways, follow-up trips are even more important than the construction," Schuster said. "It takes more energy and thought to sustain a project."
Schuster has now been to El Salvador seven times, which she said has allowed her to form strong bonds with the community there - and with the students who come to help them.
"It has been amazing to get to go back so many times, to be able to share this place and link it to people who I've met at Tufts," she said.
She has observed a great deal of growth within the community itself, she said, as its proximity to the capital of El Salvador brings people and transportation there in increasing numbers. But while she's excited to be a part of this growth, Schuster said she's also conscientious about the role that she and EWB play there.
"What's right is starting small, taking as much time as you need, working slowly and always trying your best to move with the community," she said.
Schuster herself has learned a great deal from her work with EWB, and now finds she has less difficulty understanding the engineering involved.
"I've learned a lot because of the work we do on campus - research and prototypes - and having been on the trips," she said.
"My experience with EWB has made me more an engineer than it has made anyone else [in the group] a political science major," she added, laughing.
Schuster plans to accompany EWB on its next follow-up trip in January. This summer, she hopes to pursue her own research in Arada on the challenges and obstacles faced by rural communities in running and maintaining a water source.
In the long run, Schuster looks forward to her continued work with EWB and in Arada Vieja, and laughed at the thought of how unexpected her path has been.
"If someone had told me three years ago that I would be president of Engineers Without Borders," she said, "I just wouldn't have believed them."
