After three years of effort by University of Rhode Island engineering students, a school in rural Guatemala has what American schoolchildren take for granted: working toilets. In July 2014, a team of students returned from San Mateo Ixtatán after putting the finishing touches on a sustainable wastewater treatment system they designed.

Raw sewage from the school no longer flows into a nearby river. Instead, the waste works its way through a filtration system made of local materials and not dependent on electricity, which is unreliable in the remote village high in the mountains of northwest Guatemala.

Various teams of students spent school years designing the system under the guidance of civil and environmental engineering Associate Professor Vinka Oyanedel-Craver. In the summers, they traveled to Guatemala to assist with construction and teach residents how to maintain the system. They arrived at the urging of the Ixtatán Foundation, a Virginia-based nonprofit that supports education projects in developing nations and asked URI to tackle the wastewater project in San Mateo.

“In the United States there are few times where engineers do a project and have such a close interaction with the beneficiaries,” Oyanedel-Craver says. “With this project, the students saw that engineering impacts people. It’s not just a paper you sign and submit.”

This year, the professor brought five students to the country: Louis Barone of North Providence, R.I., Jessica Damicis of Richmond, R.I., Max Grabinski of Williston Park, N.Y., Andy Shepard of Simsbury, Conn. and Joshua Wolf of South Easton, Mass. All are pursuing degrees in civil and environmental engineering except Wolf, who is a mechanical engineering student.

This year’s team had the satisfaction of completing the project, but not without a moment of panic.

The students spent the previous year designing a secondary filtration system dependent on local sand. Low cost and easy to maintain, the system would remove organic material and bacteria, and prepare the water for reuse in agriculture. When students arrived in San Mateo and opened the bags of sand, they were rock solid. Lime had mixed with water and made the sand unusable.

Far from the resources of a college campus and nowhere near a home-improvement store, the students improvised. They realized that stones could substitute for sand. They drew up new plans, procured stones, and turned a wooden garbage bin and section of wire fencing into a rudimentary gravel sieve.

“I don’t think any of us is the kind of person that would give up that easy,” Damicis says, who first visited the village in 2011. “It was exciting to have a challenge.”

It turned out to be a physical challenge and well as mental exercise. The stones that arrived on a flatbed truck were all different sizes. Students sifted through them, bagged them and lugged them up a hill to the worksite.

“Coming in freshman year I definitely didn’t see myself lugging rocks up a hill in Central America,” Barone says. “I thought it was cool to have that experience. There wasn’t a moment when I thought, ‘What did I get myself into?’”

At the worksite, students spent two weeks mixing concrete and arranging pipes to complete the trickling filter. Local residents and Stephen Andrus, a project manager at GZA GeoEnvironmental Technologies in Providence, R.I., assisted.

As the system neared competition, Damicis taught local high school students about its operation, a task she excelled at thanks to her fluent Spanish. Damicis is simultaneously pursuing a Spanish degree and an engineering degree as part of the University’s International Engineering Program, which includes a year studying and interning abroad.

Damicis says the program and her most recent visit to Guatemala inspired her to look at engineering from a global perspective. Moreover, it’s given her new view of different cultures and the challenges facing developing nations.

“San Mateo gave me a lot more appreciation about the physical labor that goes into these projects,” she says. “A lot of the stuff that works on paper doesn’t always work in the real world.”