INNOVATION January-February 2017

f ea t u r e s

A surprise second row of barbed wire, alert guards, a minefield, dogs, a river that some couldn’t swim, exhaustion, malnutrition and ill health meant that, in the end, only 12 made good their escape. Eleven survived to the end of the war; the last died just three years ago. “The point of our project”—collaboration among archaeologists, geophysicists and Jewish historians from Israel, the US, Canada, and Lithuania—“was not to disturb any remains,” says Bauman, who used his vacation time to travel to Lithuania and received expenses only for the project. Rather, “we were there simply to map the escape route and to tell the world this story of the resilience, the drive to live of these people.” Over eight days in June 2016, followed by a camera crew from PBS’s Nova series, Bauman and his team used a combination of ground-penetrating radar, two-dimensional electrical resistivity tomography, and drone photogrammetry to establish the location of “a very small, 34-metre-long tunnel with no significant infrastructure, no concrete or metal supports, no utilities.” In other words, the tunnel itself was no great engineering feat, and the technology Bauman used to map it was the same as he would use for similar projects carried out by his company, WorleyParsons, “though with it being so small and narrow, I wasn’t sure we would find it.” For Bauman, however, the tunnel’s importance goes far beyond the technology.

“Stories like that of the Burning Brigade,” he says, “which I was completely unaware of before this project, are stories the world should know and remember.” But Paneriai is by no means Bauman’s only venture into international aid—it is his second humanitarian project in 2016 alone. In January, he and six Calgary geophysicists travelled to the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, where upwards of 200,000 refugees were in desperate need of potable groundwater. With funding from Geoscientists Without Borders, the team spent two weeks in the Turkana desert identifying potential freshwater wellsites (See page 38, Innovation July/August 2016). In June, Bauman received an email from the UN, saying local workers “had drilled three successful water wells based on our data. Three!” It's that kind of success that keeps Paul Bauman returning again and again to aid work. He is not the only one. Supporting Sustainable Water Use, Malawi, 2012–2014 “I would totally do it again,” says Belinda Li, P.Eng., of her nearly two years working in a district water office in Malawi, one of the most densely populated, least developed, and driest countries in Africa. While still in school, Li was a member of the University of British Columbia chapter of Engineers Without Borders. However, it wasn’t until she had worked for a few years as a junior environmental engineer with Tetra Tech in Vancouver that she felt ready to apply for an overseas posting. “I’d had a little international experience with an internship in Bermuda,” says Li, “but not with a completely different culture. Malawi has a very polite culture. I had to do a lot of reading between the lines to learn how the system worked there, and to keep asking myself, ‘Am I offending someone right now?’ I had to be helpful, but not tell the Malawis what to do. It was really a matter of putting ego and pride aside and just learning from the experience.” A two-year volunteer assignment with Engineers Without Borders helped Belinda Li, P.Eng., contribute to the development of a national framework for a sustainable rural water system across Malawi and develop her own professional skills. P hoto , Belinda Li, P.Eng.

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