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T h u r s d ay, N ov e m b e r 28, 2024
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Jan Risher LONG STORY SHORT
The optimist’s niece
PROVIDED PHOTOS
Residents check out the view from underneath a completed bridge in Ruhango, Rwanda, in May.
BUILDING CONNECTIONS BY SERENA PUANG Staff writer
In Rwanda, there are two seasons: wet and dry. In the wet seasons, rivers can become life threatening. In Ruhango, the Rurumanza River connects two districts with a market on one side and a school on the other. Before this year, people would cross the water by foot. When water levels are high, crossing is difficult. People can lose the bundles they carry, including food intended to be sold at the market. In some cases, people drown. In communities like Ruhango, a bridge is game changer. For more than a decade, Bridges to Prosperity has been sending teams from countries including the United States and Canada to build bridges in collaboration with communities that need them. Jim Costigan, a Modjeski & Masters engineer who lives in New Orleans, went with a team sent by the National Steel Bridge Alliance in May to build a suspension bridge in Ruhango. He said that the experience opened his mind to what can be accomplished despite culture and language barriers. Before the team arrived, 60 community members and a Rwandan engineer worked for two months to lay the foundation of the bridge. On the ground, Costigan and his team worked for 14 days to construct the suspension bridge in partnership with the local community members. Many locals didn’t speak much English, and Costigan and the team of engineers didn’t speak Kinyarwanda. As it turns out, Costigan observed, the
“groans or expressions of exhaustion” know no language barriers. At one point during the project, he and a Rwandan man were carrying big, heavy rolls of chain link fence together, and once they set down, Costigan let out a “ohhhh kay” with a sigh of relief. “The rest of the day,” Costigan said. “He (the man) and his buddy were going ‘ohhhh kay.’ ” They also developed a communication method of clicks and other sounds to describe the tools that they needed on the construction site. Costigan said that his team’s role as engineers was to teach the community members, mostly rural agriculture workers who don’t have a background in steelworking, how to construct the bridge safely. The engineers who went don’t necessarily erect bridges on a daily basis, but they had expertise that helped with the project. “There were plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong,” said Jonathan Stratton, managing partner of Eastern Steelworks Incorporated and an engineer on the team with Costigan. For example, they needed to have cables hanging at the same height to build the suspension bridge correctly. “As we went along with the erection, we realized that one cable was a little bit off relative to the other,” Stratton said. The structure was workable but it required tweaking. “It takes somebody like Jim, who’s a surveyor, to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got the skill set. I’m going to go over here, and I’m going to survey,’ Stratton said. “There’s not many people in Rwanda that can survey.” Even among the engineers on the
New Orleans engineer helps build bridge in Rwanda
Jim Costigan surveys the placement of a bridge’s main suspension cables in Ruhango as part of the project for Bridges to Prosperity. He’s rocking a Krewe of Muses parade throw as a neck warmer. team, Stratton said that only three of the 11 could have pulled it off. Surveying requires special tools that many communities in Rwanda simply don’t have access to. As part of the team’s work for Bridges to Prosperity, said Stratton, they raised money to purchase tools to support more bridge building in the future. Additionally, Bridges to Prosperity helps develop a maintenance plan to preserve the bridge going forward. “A lot of people think you build a bridge — it’s this massive structure — and it just sits there and you don’t ever need to do anything to it,” said Costigan, “But they move. They vibrate. There’s repairs — things that need to be done. They age.” At the end of the building process, the team of engineers selected 10 of the
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The next Louisiana Inspired Book Club selection is Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter.” It’s a short book that won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for Welty in 1973. (It’s so short that if you listen to it at full speed, the whole book only takes three hours and 20 minutes to hear — and Eudora narrates it herself!) This particular book has been dear to me since I read it in high school. Rereading it to prepare for the discussion has been a beautiful thing. Truth be told, I’m both reading and listening to it — the story of a woman who comes back to the South from Chicago to be with her father who is sick and in the hospital in New Orleans. I’m not giving anything away here, but the bulk of the book is about her father’s death and the way the small town where he lived his life comes together to and support her in a time of mourning. I listened to the book last week as I drove home to Mississippi after I got the call that my last uncle was dying. The mirroring of the book and the world I’ve lived in this week was impossible not to miss. When I arrived to be with my uncle, I thought of these lines from Welty’s book: “What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on the roof: seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel — something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another.” Old neighbors, cousins and lifelong friends have been with our family through the grieving process. They’ve brought food. They’ve offered support. They have shared our table and told their favorite “Uncle Mack stories.” I have appreciated the sense of shared history and display of remarkable social obligation still deeply ingrained in the town where I grew up. We have had some of those wonderful moments that happen when loved ones gather to mourn the loss of one they love — strange little outings that no one could have anticipated that sometimes occur when unplanned and unstructured time avails itself. One day, my mom, aunt, cousins and I met for lunch and told Uncle Mack stories for hours. I mentioned how much I loved handmade Choctaw baskets made at the nearby reservation. None of us knew where the baskets were actually sold, but I texted a friend in Louisiana who
ä See RISHER, page 3G
HOW YOU CAN HELP: VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES Louisiana Inspired highlights volunteer opportunities across south Louisiana. If your organization has specific volunteer opportunities, please email us at lainspired @theadvocate.com with details on the volunteer opportunity, organization and the contact/registration information volunteers would need.
Acadiana
Maddie’s Footprints, 404 Youngsville Highway,Youngsville, provides financial support to cover the cost of burial and funeral expenses of those who have experienced a loss through miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death.The nonprofit also provides bereaved mothers with a care package at the time of loss. For volunteer opportunities, visit maddiesfootprints.org.
Baton Rouge
You Aren’t Alone Project, 748 Georgia Ave., Port Allen, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to forming a network of ongoing support for mental health and wellness in Baton Rouge and beyond so that no one ever has to feel alone.The project exists to encourage understanding, erase stigmas and to invest in building the right relationships that will continue moving this initiative forward. The organization supports individuals and communities, while challenging economical and societal norms to create awareness around mental health and wellness for everyone. For volunteer opportunities, visit youarentaloneproject.com.
New Orleans
The Ginger Ford-Northshore Fuller Center for Housing, Inc., 955 S. Morrison Blvd., Hammond, is a faith-driven and Christcentered ministry that uses volunteers to build and repair houses for low-income families in Tangipahoa and Livingston parishes in southeast Louisiana. Homeowners pay the agency back for building materials on terms they can afford, with no profit for the agency and no interest charged to them.Their collective repayments allow the agency to serve more folks in need. For volunteer opportunities, visit gingerfordnorthshore.org.