Students are inspired to become engineers for a good cause

In underdeveloped parts of the world, even basic engineering skills can go a long way in areas where there isn’t easy access to necessities like water.

With this in mind, a student activist group at Curry College, ONE Curry, is using as much engineering skill and funds as it can muster to bring water to a village in the Southern Sudan of Africa.

John Abdulla was inspired to start ONE Curry by the efforts of the ONE campaign to end poverty. (See more about Abdulla on pages 14-15 of the Spring Curry College Magazine) The group hosts fundraisers and awareness events to educate its community and directly aid those in need. The motivation for this specific mission, however, came from the miraculous story of one of its members, Sudanese refugee Peter Nhiany.

Nhiany fled Sudan on his own in 1987 at the age of 3, and walked for three months to Ethiopia with 20,000 others to escape militia attacks. After spending two years there in a refugee camp, he was forced out and journeyed back to Kenya, where he spent 9 more years in a United Nations refugee camp before coming to the US.

He was taken in by Jeanette Cohan and her family in Lincoln, Mass., where he attended Lincoln-Sudbury High School before he entered Curry. When Nhiany heard about ONE Curry he joined and introduced the idea of helping his village, Bor.

After seeing his family in 2006 for the first time in 19 years, Nhiany returned to the US determined to make a difference in his homeland. He sends money that he earns working maintenance jobs to his family, but seeks the help of his new community to improve conditions in the community he fled two decades ago. 

ONE Curry got in touch with another group, Village Help for South Sudan, that has already built a well in nearby Wunlang, to get an idea of how to accomplish their goal. So far, ONE Curry has raised $3,800, but the Wunlang well cost $12,000, so there is more fundraising to do. The money will go toward hiring a reliable contractor, a digging rig and other expenses.