China Tours

August 24 - September 7, 2001

 Dr. N.K. Becker, P. Eng and his colleagues were able to engineer and supervise the removal and replacement of a burned-out pump, deep in a rural village of Shiwenggou that has been without a safe drinking water supply for more than a year.

 During their second Outreach Trip, the volunteers built on the foundations laid by the first team. The scope of work that they accomplished during this trip is summarized below.

1. They re-attended at the embassy in Beijing, presented Mr. Henri-Paul Normandin, Counsellor, Head of Development Section with a copy of their feasibility study and requested his continued support of their Model Drinking Water Project
2. The students toured the campus, laboratories, classrooms and dormitories of Jinan University with representatives of their Civil Engineering and Architecture Department; were warmly welcomed by their Deputy Chancellor, their Director of Foreign Affairs and other officials; met with the Deam, Vice-Dean and other professors who will be working on the project; and met with 3 undergraduate engineering students who hope to work on this project alongside their Canadian engineering students.
3. They offered to host 4 to 6 exchange students from Jinan University in Canada during their March 2002 holiday and to have their next Outreach Team return to China with these students. Therefore, the exchange students and their faculty can spend several days in Jiushan Township with them to survey the Villages and work on the engineering design of the Model Drinking Water System.
4. They spent 3 days in Jiushan Township to conduct topographic surveys and detailed inspections of Shiwenggou and Matoudianzi Villages; met with the Country and Township officials who have been assigned to this project; inspected several Sino-German water projects completed in Linqu County over the last 7 years; and toured the Elementary School and Medical Clinic in Matoudianzi Village with local officials to assess how they might broaden their Outreach to implement improvements to these inadequate facilities.
5. They worked alongside local tradesmen, officials and villagers during the replacement of the burned-out well pump to demonstrate the hands-on, teamwork approach that they intend to apply to the implementation of the Model Drinking Water Systems. This impressed their hosts who expressed their appreciation to their Canadian volunteers for their engineering methods. (The German engineers involved in the Sino-German drinking water projects managed the projects from Jinan and did not become actively involved in the work.)

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