Transcriber: Elisa Santos Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
Over the past years,
and especially during my experience at Engineers Without Borders
in Colombia and in Karlsruhe,
I keep realizing that the true connection
comes from exchanging perspectives and experiences with others.
Perspectives are the ways we see things.
For example, expectations, goals, opinions.
Experiences, on the other hand,
are activities or events that are related to doing something.
And in my opinion,
exactly the combination of these two is what creates a real connection.
And I want to highlight this with two specific examples.
First, during my first year here at the studies
at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,
I founded the student organization Engineers Without Borders,
that develops technical projects around the world
to improve living conditions.
Because of my background as a Colombian,
I directly recognized the impact
that this organization could have in my country,
so I decided with a friend
to start a new project in the north of the country
to improve hygienic conditions of a school.
But it was all a process.
We first needed to find a team,
and not just somebody to work with.
We needed engineers from different backgrounds,
different fields, with different experiences
to work in a project
with an intrinsic motivation.
And this project was
just simply full of unknowns,
and I was just 19.
I don't know what I was thinking back then.
But anyways, we continued,
and with this team,
we first needed to define the scope and the goal of the project.
But in order to do this,
we first needed to get to know our partners.
This means get to know what their priorities are,
what their needs are, what they expect from this project.
So, we needed to first exchange perspectives.
This means we needed to really communicate with them
and to start a communication with people on the other side of the world.
But this was not enough.
It's not just about getting to know them.
It's also about getting to know ourselves,
getting to know the team.
So, what are our capabilities and what is what we want to do?
What are the challenges that we want to face?
And so, this exchange of perspectives was also within all members of the group,
with all the different intentions that they have and goals, and so on.
And in order to continue with our project, we also needed to gather information.
So, I already talked about how we have to communicate
with the other side of the world.
But we're developing a technical project,
so we need to start asking technical questions
to people without a technical background.
And that means we just need a lot of communication
and the exchange of perspectives
to really understand what they're thinking about
or what their expectations are, and so on.
But we realized this is not enough,
we have to go further, we have to increase this exchange.
And so, we couldn't just do that by exchanging perspectives.
We had to go there and start exchanging experiences
and start this face-to-face conversation.
So, we went there, even twice, to visit them,
to get to know how they are living,
to really have this real connection with them.
And already 10 months after we started all this process,
we had this unforgettable experience of going there
and exchanging this unforgettable experience
of building what we had planned.
So, we installed water tanks, water pipes, water pumps.
We improved hygienic conditions, repaired a lot of things in the school.
But the most important part of it was working together.
We worked with the locals down there, and we learned a lot from them.
It was not just that we have the solution for everything.
We have to exchange with them about how to solve problems
that arise during the construction phase
or just because of all the unknowns that we have in the project.
So, it was a cultural exchange tool to learn from another culture,
to learn how they think, and so on.
So, this was the first experience that I had,
and so we finished this project.
And the second experience I want to share with you
is about our second project in Colombia.
After finishing this one,
we started analyzing the possibility of providing drinking water
to an indigenous community
in a desert-like area in the north of the country.
And again, we had to go through a similar process as I explained before.
We had to gather a team, start this exchange of perspectives,
what their goals are,
what they want to achieve with our project,
and so on and so forth.
We also had to go there, even twice,
to also, as I said, to exchange this experience
of living with them, of seeing how they live,
how they deal with this situation of not having drinking water.
But this time, the challenges were much larger.
We're dealing with an indigenous community,
or I mean, we're working with them.
This means we needed a translator for everything.
It was just not so easy as if we just could communicate
in English or in Spanish.
We needed to communicate through a translator.
And we needed to communicate through our partners,
which was a foundation that was located in a different area as this one.
So, the exchange of perspectives was harder,
and not only about goals and opinions,
we also needed to exchange a lot about the technical issues.
And this technical challenge was huge.
We wanted to provide water,
and we wanted to desalinate water in a remote area with no power grid
and with little access to water.
So, we also needed to expand this exchange with our partners
but also here in Germany, with experts in the area,
with people that had already worked with similar projects,
and so on and so forth.
And all these challenges meant more risks, more costs,
more to be planned, and so on and so forth.
But we continued exchanging perspectives and experiences,
until already about a year later,
we finally could start the first step of our project,
which was to finish the first building
where later our water treatment plant was going to be located.
Again, we had this unforgettable experience
of working with the people there,
of sharing how they are living,
how they deal with the situation,
how they actually can live in that area.
And about a month later,
we had the final product: this building.
But unfortunately, exactly at that point,
we had to cancel our project.
And this was not easy for any of us.
But the Water Ministry of the country contacted us
and told us that they had a huge project
to deliver drinking water to the whole region,
and their pilot project was going to be located
at the exact same spot that we were working on.
So, nobody knew about this, like not even our partners,
not even the communities down there.
There was no exchange at all.
There was good intentions but no exchange.
And so, after many discussions with our partners, with the locals,
we decided, "OK. We cannot compete with the government.
We should not compete with the government."
So, we decided to cancel the project,
and we gave this building to a nearby school
to be used as a classroom.
So, we failed on delivering our goal.
But we did not fail because we built connections,
and through those connections, we were able to have positive effects.
For example, we connected different foundations
that were working in the same area towards the same goal,
and they started working together.
We connected them with governmental entities
that are also interested in solving this problem.
But we as a team also learned a lot.
We learned how to deal with these types of situations.
We learned a lot from the local population about this cultural exchange.
We learned a lot about this technical issue
or this technical challenge that we're trying to solve.
But mostly, what we learned,
I would like to summarize it
by a quote of a local worker that worked in this building,
which is David.
And he said, "We learned a lot.
But one thing I really learned was that if we work with love,
then the work is done much better than when done just with money.
I learned that."
So, we have seen with these two examples
the impact that true connections can actually have.
First, we can develop successful projects with this.
On the other hand,
we saw also how external factors play an important role,
and we might not end successfully our project,
but we have positive effects
out of this true connection that we were able to build.
But what I also think or I believe is that we are also connected
even if we are not actively searching for a connection.
And I just want you to take a look outside of this experience
of Engineers Without Borders
and start seeing, like, another perspective.
And I want to highlight this with a new example
because last year, I was at a lecture by Deborah Wilson,
which is a nurse that was leading a medical team
in Liberia in 2013 in the middle of the Ebola crisis.
And so, she was exchanging this unforgettable experience
of risking her life
in order to save lives of people she didn't even know
and sharing the experience of living with the people together in the area,
and so on and so forth.
And the reason she gave me of why Ebola arose
was very simple:
poor infrastructure for human waste.
So, communities down there were having Ebola
because they did not have toilets.
For example, a village was working with an organization
on improving their hygienic conditions,
and they had no Ebola cases during that time.
So, and the world was shocked by this outbreak of Ebola,
and I keep asking myself,
"Can we just simply reduce the risk of such an outbreak
by simply exchanging perspectives and experiences
about hygienic conditions?"
And so, we have seen how this real connection is built,
exchanging perspectives and experiences
and how we can learn a lot from people from other side of the world,
from other cultures, and so on.
But if I want you to take something out of this talk,
is that we have so much to learn by building these real connections,
and we don't have to go to the other side of the world to do this,
to Colombia or to Liberia.
We can just simply start here, at home.
We can just exchange more with our colleagues at work
because how many times have we started a project
that somebody else was already working on?
Or just exchange more with our neighbors about local situations or issues
that we actually are all interested in solving.
And I believe that in that way we can build real connections
and solve not only local problems
but probably world problems like climate change, and so on.
And the only thing we need is to exchange perspectives and experiences,
and to do so,
the only thing we need is the will to do so.
Thank you.
(Applause)