Canada: College students pump up Caribbean community

A routine International Field Studies trip to the Dominican Republic has become a mission with foot-powered irrigation pumps as its centrepiece. Niagara College students from different programs will be led by environment and horticulture professor Bill McDonald and his wife Linda MacDonald, a lab technologist.

While there next week, they'll experience life in Los Cacaos, where the college works with a fair-trade coffee co-op. MacDonald — who has a background in the greenhouse industry — learned about how treadle pumps are used in developing countries from the book Out of Poverty by Paul Polak.

The professor saw a natural fit with an emerging vegetable greenhouse industry in Los Cacaos. The pumps, activated like an elliptical machine, would irrigate the greenhouses and not depend on unreliable electrical supply.

"We are not going down there to change the world," said MacDonald. "This is a small project, it helps with community development and is for students to see and experience another culture."

MacDonald said Los Cacaos wants to expand its greenhouse industry to generate income during off-season, non-coffee-harvest times before November and after March. "They want to get that greenhouse industry going and they need the irrigation," he said. "In the developing world these treadle pumps are used quite a bit."

Read more and watch the video about the International Field Studies trip at wellandtribune.ca