A Liberty club of student engineers helps those in need in Venezuela and Cambodia

As the chaos in Venezuela continues to erupt, members of Luz del Neundo Evangelical Church seek refuge in a building with limited accessibility to power. On the other side of the world, 20 children rescued from sex-trafficking live on an orphanage houseboat in Cambodia with no access to clean water. 

Every time a strike occurs at powerplants in Venezuela, the people depending on that power are left stranded with few resources. The 500-person congregation at Luz del Neundo Evangelical gathers weekly without knowing if there will be enough power for a Sunday service. 

As the Cambodian orphanage houseboat sits docked on the Seam Reap River, the river water surrounding them is filled with erosion, pesticides and contamination, causing them to purchase expensive clean water jugs, which don’t meet all their needs. 

Two groups with drastically different circumstances found commonality when they sent out a call for help and a group of Liberty University engineering students answered. 

The Engineering Missions and Research Club, created five years ago by students and professors, is a group of engineering students at Liberty who have a passion for missions work and a desire to carry that out through engineering.

The club has spent the last year focusing on the church and the houseboat orphanage, developing two teams – a Venezuela team and a Cambodia team. Each group actively works toward creating a solution for the problem facing these people. 

In Venezuela, the club plans to create an alternative power system for a set of churches in the country, giving them another source of power when the general power goes out. In Cambodia, they want to develop a water filtration system for the orphanage home that gives them access to clean water from the river, eliminating their need to purchase expensive clean water. 

According to Carson Farmer, club president and Liberty student, the club serves as a way to connect students to opportunities and resources that help them do international missions and engineering, giving them more chances to explore career options. 

“The club began to start connecting the engineering students with missions’ opportunities and missions’ activities on the premise that engineers have a slightly different skill set and calling than most people,” Farmer said. 

Carson said engineers have different abilities to offer people who are in need of help, because they work to engineer a solution to people’s basic needs using resources that are easily accessible to the people they are helping. Due to the consistent change of technology, engineers working in missions never stop researching and looking for new solutions. 

“While a pastor can go out and go to seminary then out to the mission field, a nurse can go to school then start helping people, an engineer has to continually keep learning and researching because the technology available changes so fast with what we have access to,” Farmer said. 

The Cambodia team still waits in the research process as they are looking to test the water in the river before they begin constructing a water filtrations system. Caleb Cauthorn, a junior studying civil and industrial system engineering, leads the Cambodia team, saying they are looking for ways to transform the water in the river to be drinkable. 

“For the first couple weeks we were trying to find previous research that has already been done but just recently we were able to find a water testing lab in Cambodia that can test the water for us,” Cauthorn said. 

Six of the students in the club spend their time researching how they can implement the water purification system in Cambodia, hoping that by next semester they will have the test results they need to start developing the filter. 

Once the filtration machine is created, Cauthorn said they must write a grant to acquire the funding to implement the system through their partnership with Christar, a Christian mission organization.

“Cambodia got held up for a little bit because we couldn’t get in contact with them,” Farmer said. “We can’t always put a fixed timeline on these (as we are) working with the people on their timelines and resources.”

Due to Professor Hector Medina’s connection, the club’s professor sponsor, the Venezuela team’s access to the churches has been easier to attain, as Medina is originally from Venezuela and has close ties to Luz del Neundo Evangelical Church. 

Despite various setbacks the club faces throughout the process, their mission to share the Gospel through the work of engineering perseveres. Noah Kohl, student lead of the new prosthetics team, says his heart for missions has been impacted through this club and the work they get to do. 

“Our mission is to use the knowledge that we learn from our classes and maybe other extracurricular activities from internships and pour that into helping others and meeting the needs of people around the world that really doesn’t have anyone to help them,” Kohl said.

The prosthetics team, which was added to the club in the fall of 2019, works with the organization Hope to Walk, helping them provide below the knee prosthetics to people in developing nations. Kohl said he hopes to grow the club’s relationship with the organization and help in constructing more prosthetics to the people around the world who need them. 

As the club continues with their research, Farmer says the club members are able to get real-world experience before they step into their engineering careers, allowing them to diversify their engineering skills.

“We are a chance for a group of engineers to get involved with mission organizations,” Farmer said. “You get to see how you connect into God’s calling to reach people whether that means helping on the project short term or going into it for a long-term mission field.”

The club meets weekly on Monday nights at 7 p.m. in the School of Engineering located in DeMoss Hall to discuss their progress and problem-solve various issues they face as they work towards creating two solutions. People interested in joining the club can reach out to the club president, Carson Farmer, at cfarmer6@liberty.edu.

Troutman is the news editor. Follow her on Twitter.