“Well, what if you go talk to [the organization], they’ll listen to you.” Martha replied casually. I had just asked her how she would go about making change in her community. We had just talked about things she loved about her community: how peaceful it is, how much she enjoys talking to her neighbors, how unified they are and how well they all look out for each other. She had dreamed about Dos Caminos and her wishes for the future. Now was the design or innovation step.

In surveys and interviews with community members I utilize appreciative inquiry, a method of dreaming and innovating the future from an asset-based approach. Rather than asking the needs of the community, we start by discussing aspects of the community that people like – affirming what is good. Talking with community members and understanding the strengths of a community is an important step to designing a contextualized water system. I want to understand the community’s capacity, who has decision-making power, and how best to think about maintenance. I need to know what systems of knowledge sharing exist before suggesting point-of-use treatment. You get it, context is important.

This response from Martha stunned me. How could she believe that the only way to bring about change in her community was for a stranger, who had been there for less than a day, to talk to an outside organization? It never ceases to amaze me how difficult it can be for people to list positive aspects about where they live. It probably shouldn’t. Residents of marginalized and oppressed communities are consistently belittled by aid organizations, neocolonial governments, and even each other. People are convinced they have nothing to offer.

So then it should not surprise me that Martha does not consider herself as important in the trajectory of her community. Or that the local government, the Patronato, was not considered to have the same influence and decision-making power as this American talking with her. I guess I just did not expect the power inequities to be laid so plainly before me.

Power inequities are a core challenge for any type of collaborative work and the same can be said for contextual engineering. So often we are working with individuals who have never been asked what they want. Or, if they have, it has been based from a deficit approach. ‘What do you need? What are the problems? How can we (the Western organization) save you?’ An underlying message to the deficit approach is simply the community doesn’t have what you need to achieve a future you want.

Contextual engineering, and my research within it, seeks to communicate a different message when designing infrastructure systems with communities. I want to affirm residents and highlight the ways the community has power. I need people to understand that they have knowledge and without their expertise we – the community residents, the partnering organization, and the engineers – cannot design a system that will work well for Dos Caminos. How else would I find out that Carlos knows how to weld? Would Filo have mentioned that he was on a water board in his previous community? Would Martha, yes that Martha, have explained to another inquirer how she enfolds new neighbors into the community? It is hard to know for sure, but I don’t think so.

In the CERG we seek how to identify the power imbalances that exist in infrastructure projects. We implement participatory methods to mitigate these inequities. It is only through this intentionality that we can begin to collaborate with communities.