Story from Tech Today -- November 7, 2006
People in the small,
desperately poor Mexican town of Rosario used to call Agustin Robles
“that crazy lagoon guy.”
Now, when he visits, they call him Engineer Robles and he gets
more invitations to come to breakfast, lunch and dinner than he
can handle. “I couldn’t find enough time or space in
my stomach to accept them all,” he says. “My last few
weeks there were exhilarating.”
What caused the residents of Rosario to change their minds about
Robles, then a master’s student in environmental policy at
Michigan Tech, was the news that their town had finally received
the money to build a new sewage treatment facility.
Professor Alex Mayer, whose field engineering class designed the
system, credits Robles with knitting together the social and political
alliances that made it happen.
The story began several years ago, when Mayer, a professor of geological
and mining engineering and sciences, was in Mexico as part of an
ongoing partnership between Michigan Tech and the University of
Sonora. “I was asked if I could help with wastewater treatment
in Rosario,” he says. “They basically had untreated
wastewater going into a local creek, and the town is one of the
poorest in the state of Sonora.”
Mayer set a class of fledgling Peace Corps volunteers on the task,
and they came up with a simple, effective design. But when the town
submitted their proposal to the federal Agency for Social Development,
they were turned down twice, once for bureaucratic reasons and again
because officials didn’t think the community had the resources
to build and maintain the system. “One of the problems was
that we had little connection with the people,” Mayer says.
“The federal government didn’t want to put something
in and then have it fall apart.”
Mexico, like many developing countries, is strewn with the wreckage
of infrastructure improvements imposed on poor communities by well-intentioned
outsiders. Without funding, trained personnel or community involvement,
these shiny new assets can quickly tumble into wrack and ruin. Rosario’s
first sewage system, built in the 1980s, had suffered such a fate;
it deteriorated into a pipe feeding a lagoon that drained raw sewage
into the local river (thus the genesis of Robles’s “lagoon
guy” nickname). The lagoon was located in the city center,
surrounded by Rosario’s poorest residents.
With Mayer’s encouragement, Robles went to work. He interacted
with hundreds of citizens to assess local attitudes on water treatment,
the environment, and public health in general. A resident of Hermosillo,
the capital of state of Sonora, he was unprepared for the rural
poverty he witnessed.
“I was pretty shocked and sad that people lived that way,
that they had no other choice,” says Robles. “They worked
to obtain money for what they were going to eat that day. Their
immediate needs were so pressing, it was hard for them to focus
on the environment. It was a big learning experience for me.”
He passed on what he learned to local officials, who were initially
skeptical that the town needed a better system. And he provided
technical training on the construction and operations of the design
proposed by Mayer’s class.
“Agustin took it upon himself to educate the right people
in the community--the local officials, the engineer--and he also
had a sense of what was going on in the bureaucracy,” Mayer
said.
With Robles’s help, the town drafted a different proposal
and requested a hearing. “I went as an external advisor, but
a local engineer defended every part of the project,” says
Robles.
This time, Rosario got the money for its new system. The local
authorities built it in little over a year with local labor and
local materials. The town began pumping its sewage through the gravel-filled
pit in September. “The system is called a constructed wetlands,
and it’s based on how wetlands and swamps work in nature,”
Mayer explains. “It requires little maintenance.”
The wastewater treatment plant has become a poster child for the
right way to help marginalized communities. “The project has
gotten a lot of publicity in Mexico,” says Mayer. So much
publicity, in fact, that a grand opening is expected to draw high-level
officials from the Mexican government. “The reason people
are excited is that they see this as a way to get things done.”
“It’s been a unique partnership, involving us, the
Mexican Social Services Agency, the community, and the University
of Sonora,” says Mayer. It has also forged unusual ties within
Michigan Tech. Faculty from the Department of Social Sciences, including
Robles’s advisor, Professor Mary Durfee, and Associate Professor
Carol Maclennan, assisted with the community survey.
Robles has earned his master’s and is now pursuing a PhD
in Environmental Engineering, in part because he wants to continue
what he started in Rosario. “We wanted to extend the work,”
he says. “And also, it’s very gratifying for me to be
welcomed as one of their own.”
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