In Rwanda, there are two seasons: wet and dry.

During wet seasons, rivers can be life threatening. In Ruhango, the Rurumanza River connects two neighborhoods with a market on one side and a school on the other. Before this year, people crossed the water on foot. When water levels are high, crossing is difficult. People can lose the packages they are carrying, including food intended to be sold at the market.

In some cases, people drown.

In communities like Ruhango, a bridge is a game-changer. For more than a decade, Bridges to Prosperity has sent teams from countries like the United States and Canada to build bridges in collaboration with communities in need.

Jim Costigan, an engineer with Modjeski & Masters who lives in New Orleans, left in May with a team sent by the National Steel Bridge Alliance to build a suspension bridge in Ruhango. He said the experience opened his mind to what could be accomplished despite cultural and language barriers.

Before the team arrived, 60 community members and a Rwandan engineer worked for two months to lay the bridge’s foundation. On the ground, Costigan and his team worked for 14 days to build the suspension bridge in partnership with members of the local community. Many residents didn’t speak much English, and Costigan and the engineering team didn’t speak Kinyarwanda.

It turns out, Costigan observed, that “groans or expressions of exhaustion” know no language barrier.

At one point during the project, he and a Rwandan were carrying large, heavy rolls of chain-link fencing together, and once they were laid, Costigan let out an “ohhhh kay” with a sigh of relief.

“The rest of the day,” Costigan said. “He (the man) and his friend were like ‘ohhhh okay.’”

They also developed a method of communicating using clicks and other sounds to describe the tools they needed on the job site.

Costigan said his team’s role as engineers was to teach community members, primarily rural agricultural workers who don’t have metalwork experience, how to build the bridge safely. The engineers who went on site didn’t necessarily build bridges on a daily basis, but they had expertise that helped make the project happen.

“There were plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong,” said Jonathan Stratton, managing partner of Eastern Steelworks Incorporated and an engineer on Costigan’s team.

For example, the cables had to hang at the same height to properly build the suspension bridge.

“As we went through the assembly, we realized that one cable was a little offset from the other,” Stratton said.

The structure was workable but required adjustments.

“It takes someone like Jim, who is a surveyor, to say, ‘Hey, I have the skills. I’m going to go out here and I’m going to investigate,” Stratton said. “There are not many people in Rwanda who can investigate.”

Even among the team’s engineers, Stratton said only three of 11 could have pulled it off. Surveys require special tools that many communities in Rwanda simply do not have access to. As part of the team’s work for Bridges to Prosperity, Stratton said, they raised money to purchase tools to support more bridge building in the future.

Additionally, Bridges to Prosperity helps develop a maintenance plan to preserve the bridge into the future.

“A lot of people think you build a bridge — it’s this massive structure — and it sits there and you never need to do anything,” Costigan said, “But they move. They vibrate. There are repairs, things that need to be done. They are getting old.

At the end of the construction process, the engineering team selected 10 of the strongest candidates who learned the skills and worked hard to become stewards of the bridge to help maintain it in the future, and they unveiled the bridge for the community.

“You thought, ‘Wow, look how excited these people are,’” Costigan said.

He added that it was a very emotional experience for him and the team. They helped small children and even adults who were unsure of which bridge to cross for the first time, which conveyed the message that the bridge was safe and strong.

According to Nicola Turrini, senior enterprise program manager for Bridges to Prosperity, the work isn’t just about these engineers’ brief stint in the field: it’s a partnership between organizations like the National Steel Bridge Alliance and local communities.

“Through knowledge transfer, it has helped us improve our standards in design, construction, safety and even procurement in many ways,” he said. “Because we deal with large companies in the world of architecture, construction and engineering, they can and will really step up our game.”

For local communities like Ruhango, a bridge is just the tip of the iceberg. In Rwanda, impassable and flooded rivers lead to reduced school attendance for children and loss of income. They exacerbate isolation, which can lead to worse health outcomes and deprivation of vital services.

According to Turrini, a recent study of 150 Rwandan communities found that communities served by bridges are experiencing incredible changes, including:

• a 200% increase in the number of girls in school because they no longer have to risk their lives crossing swollen rivers,
• a 30% increase in household income,
• a 75% increase in agricultural investments within communities.

“The bridge itself brings a change of mentality, a change of system,” Turrini said. “People decide to invest more in their businesses because they know they have safe access to the other side of the river, no matter what. No matter the weather, no matter what day it is. year, no matter the rainy season or the dry season, they are able to go to the market and sell these products – so they invest more in their crops in order to sell more.

Sending foreign engineers to work on these projects has an added publicity and awareness benefit. Those who help build a bridge abroad can return home, share their experiences and perhaps even inspire others to get involved and work on other projects.

“Rwanda has a huge need for hundreds more bridges like this,” Costigan said.

He hopes spreading awareness of the program and the work Bridges to Prosperity does will attract more engineers to help build another bridge.

Although the Bridges to Prosperity model builds physical bridges in the community, it also builds connections with residents. They work across language barriers trying to participate and learn more about local life, thanks to the drivers who took them from their accommodation to the construction site every day and spoke the local language as well as English fluently.

“Our drivers, Jimmy and Brilliant, were great at sharing the local culture,” Stratton said.

This experience included local music. Each morning, upon arriving at the construction site, the group participated in a team-building exercise that involved Rwandan call-and-response-style chanting. After a few days, Costigan also created one for the American team.

“We followed their social norms,” he said. “By the end of the two-week period, our stoic, hard American faces had simply melted. »