Building sustainable water sources in Uganda

For Claudia Flores, this summer means more than time off and trips to the beach—it means using what she’s learned to help Ugandan villages develop and maintain safe water sources.

The UCLA environmental science student will be blogging weekly about the experience. You can follow her adventures on Medium, where she recently chronicled the project she’s working on and her first experiences in a culture that’s completely new to her.

After two days of travel, Flores and three other students arrived in south Uganda on Monday. So far, the traffic has been rough: “think of L.A. during rush hours, but twice as bad.” But local produce has been a pleasant surprise: “the best bananas I’ve ever tasted.”

The students are participating in a summer internship organized by the UCLA chapter of GlobeMed. Their water project is an extension of the Mpoma Community HIV/AIDS Initiative. Located along the trans-continental highway, the town of Mukono has been hit hard by the AIDS crisis—up to 20 percent of residents are HIV positive.

The project creates water user committees and establishes usage fees that are agreed upon by the community—ensuring there’s enough money in the bank to fix wells when they break. The students will also compile data to evaluate the success of the program, with a goal of producing a research paper that will guide future interns.