While most of us spent our childhoods relying on cars or school buses to go to school, the children at Paomaping Village in Yunnan, China do not have such a luxury. Up until the recent completion of the village’s first bridge, the school children of the Yi minority group would have to walk on stepping stones across their local river to travel to school. Come rainy season, however, the school children and the rest of the villagers would face up to three months of isolation from the outside world when floods blocked the Lamading River.

In August, five students and one faculty member from the University, along with 54 other volunteers from Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan, spent eight days in the remote village of Paompaing building the “Dees Family Wu Zhi Qiao Bridge.” The 43-meter-long bridge will serve over 300 farmers and 48 school children.

What’s most compelling about the completion of the Dees Family Wu Zhi Qiao Bridge, however, is that it was designed entirely by students from the University.

Backtrack to spring of 2009, Chuan Li, currently a senior in Civil Engineering, was studying abroad at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

There, Li met a student who was involved with the Bridge to China (Wu Zhi Qiao) Charitable Foundation — the foundation behind the bridge in Paomaping.

“I thought it was really cool so I got more and more involved with the project,” Li said about the foundation, which aims to improve the lives of the poor in rural communities in China with urgent bridge-building needs. “I got to know the CEO and project manager of the Wu Zhi Qiao, Bridge to China Foundation, so I mentioned the idea of having something like this in the U.S.”

What started out as a Registered Student Organization in the fall of 2009 would turn into a class the following spring. Upon returning to the University from his study abroad program, Li was put in touch with Valeri Werpetinski, a specialist in education at the Instructional Development in the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Werpetinsk and Professor Bruce Litchfield, Assistant Dean of the College of Engineering, were heading a course in the spring of 2010 called Engineering 298: Learning in Community.

The course was service-learning based, where students worked with non-profit organizations on projects proposed by the organization.

Li, along with his childhood friend and classmate Jake Zhao, currently a senior in General Engineering, would become the project managers (instructors) of one of the ENG 298 sections, Bridge to China.

As project managers of the Bridge to China engineering course, Li and Zhao managed the different groups within the class and coordinated the communication between the Bridge to China Charitable Foundation in Hong Kong and the partnering university in China, Chongqing University.

“The goal of the class was to come up with a feasible design that they (Bridge to China Charitable Foundation ) could use,” Zhao said.

A combination of inexperience and communication barriers made the design process harder than the project managers and students had expected.

“Although we were a very diverse group of people from many different majors (engineering and non-engineering), none of us had ever designed a bridge,” said Andrew Smith, a sophomore in Aerospace Engineering that participated in the class and went on the actual build. “It was a real baptism of fire type experience. We learned as we went through the course. We researched a lot and countless presentations were made to the class.”

Another major problem was the distance between the project partner and the students.

Jeff Sandler, a fifth-year student in Architectural Studies, said “Working with a partner that was thirteen hours ahead and whose primary language is Cantonese made for sometimes slow communication.”

For Sandler, who was the technical design team leader of the class and also participated in the actual build, it was also a matter of cultural differences.

“Work and labor happen differently in different cultures,” Sandler said. “Design standards vary between countries and expectations can be misunderstood by outsiders.”

With the foundation rejecting all three of the designs from the first round, the project managers scrambled to separate the class into seven groups, running seven designs simultaneously.

For some of the Bridge to China students, the setbacks they faced would turn around to become enlightening learning experiences. “One of my main contributions to the class was doing some materials testing on a steel sample Chuan had brought back with him from China on the survey trip,” said Smith, who hopes to become a project manager of the ENG 298 in the near future.

“At the time I was taking a course Materials Science & Engineering course so I asked my professor for help.”

With help from his professor Lane Martin, Smith was able to conduct tests and ended-up making a presentation to the class about his findings.

The collaborative effort between the students also worked out at the end of the semester, as Chongqing University accepted the final design that the University submitted — a consolidated version of the seven designs.

As the actual bridge building took place from August 13 to August 20, members of the Illinois team couldn’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction while seeing their hard way pay-off.

“One of my biggest interests in architecture is the people who we are actually designing for,” Sandler said. “I am fascinated by other cultures and find great happiness in interacting with people different from myself and understanding our similarities no matter where we are from.”

For Li and Zhao, it was about giving back to their home country, where they both grew-up before immigrating in middle school.

“I think some of the young kids are going to see all this process and it’s going to impact them,” Li said. “They’re going to feel that they want to do this; make a positive impact in the future.”

Zhao, who grew up in a house with no running water and had to use outdoor toilets, said that there are still many rural villages in China that need help with development.

For Zhao, improving the living conditions of rural communities starts with higher education.

“We introduced them to higher education,” Zhao said. “They can set their goals higher by saying, ‘Hey I’m going to one day be like them, I’m going to go to college.’”