Civil Engineering Summer Camp in the South

Civil summer camp participants

For the past two years, the Civil Engineering Society (CES) has been organizing volunteer summer camps for interested civil engineering students so they could gain hands-on professional experience while doing community service and also spend some moments of pleasure with their classmates and professors.

The Civil Summer Camp of 2006 was held between the spring and summer semesters in the village of Mishmish, Akkar. About 15 students and two faculty members participated in the camp, which was jointly organized and conducted by the society and the Economic and Social Fund for Development (ESFD) at the Council for Development and Reconstruction. The activity, hosted and welcomed by the municipality of Mishmish, was supported and funded by the ESFD and by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at AUB. The participating students assisted in public works and in the construction of both a health care and an agricultural development center. They also helped groups of local scouts clean up the forest and tutor village students in various school subjects to help them prepare for the Brevet exams. All in all, the 2006 venture was a modest accomplishment, a stepping stone that could lead to more organized camps in the future.

In May of this year, the CES and ESFD prepared for Volunteer Summer Camp 2007, but it was postponed because of the prevailing political situation in the country. The CES students, however, did not give up and insisted on conducting the camp. With the help of its faculty adviser and with the support of the ESFD and the CEE Department, the camp was hastily organized. The activity was further supported and funded by the Task Force for Reconstruction and Community Service at AUB. Surprisingly, and even before a public announcement was made, 25 students by "word of mouth" expressed interest and eventually more than 40 volunteers joined up. The camp took place between August 25 and September 1 in the deep South, where the need for reconstruction was pressing.

The volunteering students were split equally into two groups, working in the villages of Tyre and Rcheif in the caza of Bint Jbeil and in the village of Zebqine in the caza of Sour, which had been heavily demolished during the July war. The work involved the construction and rehabilitation of homes, the surveying of houses, and road and infrastructure assessment. The organization of the camp by CES and ESFD included workshops and professional training sessions, a safety seminar on landmines and cluster bombs, and a presentation on the state of destruction and current reconstruction initiatives in south Lebanon.

The camp activity was hosted by the local municipalities of the villages, which provided the needed support and logistics to the volunteers. The camp also teamed up with the Beit-bil-Jnub initiative at AUB, which is acting as a volunteer regional technical office in south Lebanon in collaboration with UN-Habitat to provide technical assistance to over 1,000 homeowners whose houses were completely destroyed.

Working on the site ran smoothly overall, with the volunteers laboring hard but still enjoying it all under the sometimes harsh, hot conditions. Safety was a prime concern and adequate measures in that regard were strictly enforced. Hard hats were compulsory, and students were forbidden to stray in open fields away from their sites, for fear of landmines and unexploded cluster bombs. Drinking lots of water was advised.

Still, the work did not escape without a few worrisome incidents. A first-rate safety "lesson" learned on site occurred when a masonry block slipped from a height and fell on one student who was wearing the hard hat. He escaped unharmed, fortunately, but the hat bore the heavy toll; it is currently on display in the CEE Department and worth a million warnings.

The summer camps not only gave the students opportunity to gain practical engineering experience, but also helped motivate the villagers to work on the development of their own areas. The modest contributions made by the students to the welfare of the villages visited will certainly remain an important influence in their lives as community-concerned citizens.