Auburn’s EWB team returns from Bolivia with mountains of ‘real engineering’ experience
Published: Oct 15, 2026 9:00 AM
By Phillip Tutor
Auburn Engineering students install pipe components that will deliver water to Bolivian crop fields.
The Andes Mountains, where air is thin and the sky seems close enough to touch, is where Candace Bardwell may have first pondered the deeper meaning of Auburn Engineering’s latest trip to Bolivia.
She hasn’t forgotten.
“It reminds you why you want to be an engineer,” said Bardwell, a sophomore civil engineering major from Huntsville. “School is hard. Sometimes you think, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But then you go in country and realize that this is why I’m doing this. This is what I want to do.
“It reminds you that engineering has a real effect on people.”
In mid-August, Bardwell and the rest of an Auburn Engineers Without Borders (EWB) team returned from Quesimpuco, the Bolivian village where the university’s chapter is working on a gravity-fed micro-irrigation system that will dramatically increase the agricultural growing seasons and quality of life for local residents. Auburn EWB teams also work in Guatemala and the U.S.
Sitting 13,500 feet above sea level — more than twice the elevation of the Mile High City of Denver — Quesimpuco features a dichotomy of geographic truths: exquisite Andean vistas that overwhelm visitors and lengthy dry seasons that limit farmers’ ability to cultivate sufficient food crops.
For millennia, Quesimpuco villagers have cut channels into rocky soil and watered their fields through flood irrigation, said EWB faculty advisor Jack Mongtomery. But that’s an inefficient method — water seeps into the ground and leaks from the channels — that’s reliant on Bolivia's seasonal weather. Given ample water for irrigation, Quesimpuco farmers grow corn, wheat, potatoes and other root vegetables. When fields are dry, vegetables become scarce.
“Our goal is to extend their growth,” said Montgomery, the Alice H. and John M. Ozier Associate Professor of civil and environmental engineering. “What will that be? We don't really know yet, but the goal is to extend the growing season and allow them to grow other crops.”
In August, Auburn’s nine-person cohort departed for Quesimpuco on a round-trip journey of more than 7,400 miles. With Montgomery and fellow faculty advisor Joe Ragan, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering, in tow, the team drove to Orlando, Florida, boarded two international flights — first to Bogota, Colombia, then to La Paz, Bolivia — and endured a 12-hour caravan along twisting roads that spiraled through the Andes.
In previous years, volunteers and residents built a catchment tank that collects water from a high-elevation natural spring and a 30,000-gallon concrete storage tank that sits several kilometers above the village’s more than 250 terraced fields. More than a half-mile of pipeline and pressure-reducing stations deliver that water down the mountain’s face.
This year’s EWB Bolivia student team — project manager Ellie Waibel, Jasmine Blewett, Martha Goldman, Adriana Lacayo, Dylan Morgan, Gavin Valentine and Bardwell — spent five days laying over 800 feet of three-inch, high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe into modest trenches residents had previously dug. As part of the project’s southern line, that pipe will connect to moveable sprinklers and irrigate one of the fields. Villagers will install another 2,100 feet of pipe before Auburn’s EWB team returns in 2027.
“None of this project is possible without the community buy-in,” Bardwell said.
With Ragan’s help, students also introduced a new process — fusion welding, which melts pipe ends and fittings together to form a permanent joint — that eliminated the labor-intensive method the team previously used. The students used a gasoline-powered, portable fusion-welding machine to improve the quality of the joints and helped Ragan teach community members how to use it.
“Engineers use it a lot in industrial applications, but we're just using it on a smaller scale,” said Waibel, a junior industrial engineering major from Dayton, Ohio.
That technology isn’t new to engineers in the U.S., but it was a novel concept to Bolivian villagers who primarily rely on hand tools. Developing their fusion-welding skills became one of the team’s major focuses.
“Ideally, the residents are going to keep doing fusion welding after we're gone,” Montgomery said.
As project manager, Waibel couldn’t wait until she and her teammates arrived on site to determine if the technology would work in the Andes Mountains, she said. That process became one of the team’s main advance objectives during their weekly Thursday evening meetings.
“There was a lot of pre-trip stuff my team and I had to work on, including coming up with a backup plan for what we do while we’re there if this testing process doesn’t work,” she said.
The success of this year’s project, or Auburn’s EWB chapter at large, can’t be measured solely by on-site accomplishments like pipeline installation and skills training, Montgomery said. “I see our role as developing Auburn engineers, but doing it in a way that's helping others,” he said. EWB, he believes, teaches Auburn students “real engineering” that involves critical thinking amid constraints and limited resources.
“Those are skills employers want out of Auburn engineers,” Montgomery said. “And what better way to learn it than on the side of the mountain in Bolivia where you've got those things right in front of you? For me, it's easily the most meaningful thing I've done as an Auburn professor.”
At home on the Plains, Bardwell fondly remembers what she experienced on her first trip to Bolivia — the nippy Andes weather, the home-cooked meals of goat meat and llama meatballs and quinoa soup, the residents’ hospitality. But nothing topped the thought of water flowing into the Quesimpuco villagers’ fields.
“It shows you what engineering is capable of,” Bardwell said.
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