Goodbye Potluck

We had a wide variety of food, mostly store bought, but nevertheless, the potluck was a success! Our two groups (Nicaragua and Guatemala) intermingled with one another as well. We also had a special shout-out to our seniors who are graduating and especially Karen. She had been our past president, project lead of the Nicaragua team, and done so much for our club! Thanks to everyone for making this a successful year! Keep an eye out for any summer updates (possibly about grants and traveling in September) via email or through this blog!

Last Meeting of the Year

Tuesday was our last meeting of the school year! Next week we will be having a potluck so be sure to write down on the Google Doc that Suzanne sent out what you plan to be cooking or buying (if you are not so handy in the kitchen).
We had a shorter meeting this week where we mostly discussed the conference call with Tiffany, from EWB-USA that will be next Wednesday. We anticipated questions that might be asked and discussed our answers to them. If there were any uncertainties about any topics whether in regards to construction materials or cost issues, we were able to verify and hear explanations. So it was good to bounce ideas off each other and have a better understanding of our upcoming trip.

This last involvement involves our favorite social network Facebook! Please "like" EWB-USA on Facebook! Also EWB-UCLA has a Facebook group so join our group as well!

Traveling Discussion

First of all, great job to everyone who worked hard on completing the 525 form! The rest of the meeting was devoted to preliminary traveling discussion. People interested in traveling filled out a travel waiver form. We discussed tasks and duties that each person would have during the trip. We also talked about taking more pictures this time. Taking more pictures can only help us in the future when we need information about the building site especially. It takes so much time and effort to go on these trips that we need to make every trip worthwhile! We are planning to travel September 2-19 and hopefully this is early enough to give Marvin a heads-up so he can plan to get the materials, contractor, and other things we may need to start construction of the foundation.

Other announcements include a possible end-of-the-year social! It could be a barbeque at Sunset Rec or another potluck!

T-Shirts!

After much discussion about making an EWB t-shirt, our t-shirts arrived and with five dollars you can pick yours up at the next meeting! The t-shirts weren't the only highlights of our meeting- we also discussed completing the necessary manuals, CADing the rest of our designs, and assigning grants to apply for. We decided that our maintenance and construction manuals should have more pictures since most of the community has little or basic literacy skills. There are members of our team who enjoy CADing! So the design team will work with them to finish drawing up our building plans. Lastly, it's important to keep searching for grants that we can apply for so please keep looking for foundations that can support our project!

EWB-USA Presentation & Saturday's Work Day

We had a special guest during this week's meeting! Pearl Abarca, the West Coast SoCal representative from Engineers without Borders-USA, gave a presentation during our general meeting. She shared some advice and helpful tips. I'll just name a few. There are scholarships for students to attend the EWB conferences! Sign up to be a member and you can access resources on the EWB website such as learning Spanish and getting ideas from other EWB chapters. She also encouraged us to get to know the leaders in EWB since they are very approachable and hands-on.

During our Nicaragua meeting, we first discussed this Saturday's work day. At 11 AM, we will be meeting in the patio between Eng. I and Eng. V. Come out and learn how to mix some cement! Also, we gave a round of applause to David for finishing the foundation design! With that off our list, we're now just left with completing the maintenance manual, cost analysis and CADing our design!

Elections!

Congratulations to our new board members! From their speeches, they had great new ideas for the upcoming year so I'm definitely looking forward to it!

Since elections took up most of our time, we had a brief project meeting. Tentatively, next week we will be having a work day to practice mixing concrete instead of our regular meeting. It will most likely be between Engineering I and Engineering V where the ASCE concrete canoe work area is located. So come prepared to do some mixing! Also, we found out that Simpson Strong-tie does not have strong-ties located in Nicaragua which means we may have to find another construction company who has the material we need in Nicaragua and is willing to donate. Lastly, our maintenance and construction manual is still in progress and we're going to continue to look for grants that we can apply for so we can travel this summer.

Structural Discussion and PCC

During Tuesday's meeting, it was an exciting time for nominations! Members nominated other members to the positions of president, internal/external vice president, treasurer, secretary, etc. If you were not able to make it out to the meeting but wanted to nominate yourself or someone else, you will still be able to next week right before our elections. The best way to be more involved in EWB is through a leadership position!

After splitting into our respective groups, we discussed traveling (most likely September) and grants (keep looking!). Then half the team went up to the white board to discuss building design plans and the other half of the team stayed to work on the pairwise comparison chart that we started last week. The results of the PCC showed that safety (obviously) was our highest priority. Our next task is to rank our categories for each priority. Example: for roofing, we have three options: metal, painted metal, and plastic; we rank each option in terms of safety, environmental sustainability, costs of maintenance, etc. We didn't finish filling out the chart since most of us were not experts on the benefits and disadvantages of metal versus plastic, but we did our best!

Lastly, we also discussed the possiblity of having our work day (practicing mixing concrete) on May 3 which is a Tuesday. Instead of our regular meeting, we would have our work day! This is a great way to get some hands-on experience and take a break from studying for midterms. Just a heads up that our "meeting" that day will probably be for 2 hours!