Dean Gruzleski's admiration is infectious. When McGill's Class of 1951 approached him with the idea of donating money to mark their 50-year anniversary, he sang the praises of EWB. The result was a gift of $5,000 used to partially fund the conference, with the class continuing to raise $51,000 for an endowment fund earmarked for future projects.

Ali Shivji demonstrates emergency lighting system in a hospital in India

And there is no shortage of projects on EWB-McGill's slate, ranging from bringing in guest speakers to liaising with local grassroots organizations and NGOs. Conliffe is optimistic that the upcoming fall semester will see the debut of an EWB course in the Faculty of Engineering curriculum, in which fourth-year students collaborate, for academic credit, on a specific project -- be it a water sanitation system or prosthetic limbs for landmine victims -- and then field-test their solutions during the summer.

A similar course is already under way at Waterloo, where students designed and implemented a safe water source for a Chilean desert community plagued by ground- water arsenic problems. Conliffe adds that there are also plans to launch an information technology project expanding on work that EWB-McGill treasurer Louis Dorval did during his fall semester internship in the Philippines.

"Engineers Without Borders gives students the opportunity to make a difference," says Conliffe. "As clichÈ as it may be, it's a social consciousness thing. It's the realization that you've got skills. You've had the opportunity to get an education, you have access to resources not everyone in the world has access to, and you want to use these things to make a difference. But EWB is not a 'feel-good club' in the sense that you're doing these projects for yourself. You're doing it for other communities."

	Shivji assembles WLED lamps

Which isn't to say that Ali Shivji doesn't feel good about his work with EWB -- because, well, he does. Since returning from his internship, Shivji has been a fervent EWB booster, using his position as a Student Senator at McGill to help spread the good word. He also makes frequent presentations, featuring selections from the 42 rolls of film snapped during his travels, in the hope of getting other students equally fired up.

"I was just a third-year engineering student," he says. "Did I have specific technical skills so I could go work at a company like IBM? No. But I could do something like this. You can still make a large impact even though you may think you don't have all the technical skills.

"For me, that's the most important point: with so little, I could achieve so much."

James Martin is a freelance writer in Montreal