As a reminder, the VT Professional Chapter does maintain a separate listserv, hosted on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ewb_vt/. These are the August meeting notes, as posted there as well.

----------------------------------------------------

Thanks to everyone who came to the last EWB professionals meeting! We
had a few new faces and we heard an interesting presentation from
Peter on how he's built his company, and the kind of small scale water
supply and sanitation work they're doing. Some of the challenges that
 he thinks are going to be present in EWB projects that he doesn't run
into in Vermont are availability of materials, limited skill-sets of
laborers, and operator training. Peter also offered his connection
with Middlebury College as a way to broadan the reach of the Vermont
Professionals. Sebastian mentioned involving members of the UVM
infectious disease school.

We agreed to hold the next meeting on Monday, September 10. Since I'm
in Afghanistan until late September, Terry Barrett will be
coordinating. He will let everyone know the location and the featured
speaker, though I believe that Kaytee Manchester volunteered to talk
about her work in Honduras. Terry or Sebastian also proposed having
the student and professional meetings on the same day and location if
possible.

The student chapter will be having their first meeting of the year on
September 10 in Perkins 211 at 7pm. I will forward Jacquie's email
for those who aren't crosslisted. Note the update on their kayak
raffle. Perhaps the students could be available to sell us some
raffle tickets at the September 10 meeting.

The EWB Northeast Regional workshop is being held at Rowan University
in New Jersey on October 5-7. Terry and I are definitly planning to
carpool. Please let one of us, or the group, know if you're
interested in traveling down. This is a great way to get ideas and to
see what other chapters are up to.

I promised to prepare a quick presentation for the October meeting
about my work here in Afghanistan. In the meantime, I thought the
Vermont professionals would be interested to know that I ran into a
member of the Portland chapter in a province called Panjsher. She
works for the US Army Corps of Engineers as a civilian structural
engineer and she's been in Afghanistan for the last 6 months
overseeing design and construction of about 20 small infrastructure
projects. She says it has been a great experience. I'll only be here
for a month, but hopefully I can give an intersting perspective on
engineering successes and challenges here, too.

Best,

Maggie


Margaret Ramalho McMorrow, P.E.
Staff Associate
ARD, Inc.

[log in to unmask]
+93 0797 421 938