While much of the world this week is riveted by images of natural destruction along the American Gulf Coast, several Duke students and alumni returned to the United States with memories of another recent disaster.
It's been nine months since a tsunami surged over the land in Sumatra and other areas of the Indian Ocean, but as Deirdre McShane tells it, the line of demarcation that separated the area of destruction from the land the tsunami didn't touch is still as stark and uncompromising as the Berlin Wall.
"We were walking down a busy street, with three-story buildings on both sides, tons of motorbikes and trucks zipping around, with the sides of the road jammed with stalls selling mostly fruit and meat when we suddenly stepped into the area that the tsunami reached," McShane wrote in an e-mail message. "The sense of lost life was immense. We didn't just see broken bricks and chunks of concrete. We saw broken plates, children's toys, shoes, photo albums, things that reminded us of the lives that once thrived there."
And that was after eight months of cleanup.
In August, McShane and four other Duke students affiliated with Engineers Without Borders went to Banda Aceh on the island of Sumatra, the area hit hardest by the December tsunami, to help rebuild shrimp hatcheries that locals from the nearby village of Lamnga relied upon for subsistence.
McShane, who graduated this past May, and fellow engineering alumna Jean Foster '05 laid the groundwork for a Duke chapter of Engineers Without Borders in the fall of McShane's senior year at Duke, several weeks before the tsunami hit. By the spring semester, they had a mailing list of about 70 students and a faculty adviser who had been to Indonesia as part of a tsunami relief effort in March. Professor David Schaad, assistant chair of the civil and environmental engineering department, provided the students with contacts in Banda Aceh and Papua, Indonesia.
McShane and Foster received funding from the Lord Foundation and selected three other Duke engineering students -- rising seniors Tyler Brown, Jim Garnevicus and Emily Wren -- to rebuild the hatcheries in Lamnga and build rock boxes to control erosion in Papua. Matt Edmundson, a photojournalist recently graduated from Tufts University, accompanied them on the two-week trip.
The group learned several lessons about the traveling and doing construction in disaster areas. Brown, who took the lead on designing a simple aerator that would increase the oxygen supply to the shrimp and boost their yield, thought that the materials would await them in Lamnga. Instead, the student engineers had to pierce the language barrier to buy 2- and 3-inch PVC piping and rope. The students also devised a way to control the erosion of the dirt walls surrounding the hatcheries by using palm fronds and fishing nets.
The aerator was up and running before the Duke students headed to Indonesia for their second stop.
"Seeing the villagers using the aerator, it made me feel good to be physically doing something to help," Brown said. "Up until that point, I hadn't applied my knowledge outside the classroom."
The students then took a memorable plane flight in a small charter plane through the rain to land on a narrow strip of grass. This is what passes for a runway in the mountains of Papua, an island in Indonesia. "That was kind of terrifying," Foster said.
Once on land, though, the students had a warm welcome. Many of the 400 residents of the mountain village came out to escort them to the best house in town, a wooden hut with raised platforms for beds. Curious village residents studied the students over the course of the visit.
"We'd be outside brushing our teeth," Foster said, "and there would be 20 or 30 people standing there in a circle staring at us."
The villagers and students worked together to build rock boxes to control erosion from the rivers that surrounded the village. The boxes were little more than cages of fencing filled with rocks and pushed against the cliffs. After teaching the residents how to build and use the boxes, the students toured the village with some of the village elders, exchanging ideas with the elders about where to use the erosion-control tool and what more needed to be done.
McShane said, "It was an honor that the most important figures in the village were seeking our advice and that they respected what we suggested. It was a very empowering experience to realize that I used what I have learned in my engineering classes to give educated advice that may help them prevent further erosion and perhaps save their village."
The day before the students were to leave Papua, the villagers cooked a pig, and the elders presented the meat to the students. Because a flood in January had killed many of the pigs and other village livestock, the pig was valuable, Foster said.
For Brown, the trip solidified his desire to pursue humanitarian aid for at least a year or two before doing graduate work in engineering.
"We were doing things that affected these people's livelihoods," he said. "In Papua, the airstrip they relied on to import goods to survive was eroding away. We were in a position to fix that and help them survive."
After fall semester started, more than 150 freshmen engineering students at Duke expressed interest in Engineers Without Borders. The Duke chapter, which has applied for official recognition from the national office of Engineers Without Borders, hopes to organize a humanitarian aid trip over winter break, possibly to the Dominican Republic or Africa.
There seem to be a good number of students ready for the adventure. "I wish every undergrad could have an experience as powerful as what the five of us went through in Indonesia," McShane said.
The Duke chapter of Engineers Without Borders (awaiting official recognition from the national office) will make a presentation about the trip to Banda Aceh and Papua from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 13, in Schiciano Auditorium, Side B, in CIEMAS. The public is invited to this free event.