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.
Jim Costigan's post trip highlight reel summarizing his time in Rwanda building a bridge with B2P
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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.
Workers constructing a suspension bridge in Ruhango, Rwanda in May. The bridges are created in partnership with local communities.
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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.
Jim Costigan surveying the placement of the 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.
“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 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.
People walking on the bridge the team built in May 2024.
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“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 strongest candidates who picked up the skills and worked hard to become stewards of the bridge to help maintain it going forward, and they had a bridge unveiling for the community.
“You felt like, ‘Wow, look at how excited these people are,'” Costigan said.
He added that it was a really emotional experience for him and the team. They helped little kids and even adults who were unsure about the bridge cross for the first time, which relayed the message that the bridge was safe and sturdy.
The bridge unveiling ceremony, called an inauguration, is the busiest the bridge will ever be. The community gathered to celebrate this new chapter.
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According to Nicola Turrini, corporate program senior manager for Bridges to Prosperity, the work is not just about the brief stint these engineers have on the ground — it’s a partnership between organizations like the National Steel Bridge Alliance and local communities.
“With knowledge transfer, it helped us by improving our standards in design and construction and in safety and in even procurement in so many ways,” he said. “Because we are dealing with big companies in the architecture, construction and engineering world, they really can and will be able to step up our game.”
For local communities like Ruhango, a bridge is just the tip of the iceberg. Uncrossable, flooded rivers in Rwanda lead to reduced school participation for children and income loss. They exacerbate isolation, which can lead to worse health outcomes and not receiving vital services.
According to Turrini, a recent forthcoming study that followed 150 Rwandan communities found that communities served by bridges see incredible change, including:
- a 200% increase in girls attending schools because they no longer have to risk their lives crossing the flooded rivers,
- a 30% increase in household income,
- a 75% increase in agriculture investment within the communities.
During the 14 bridge building project in May, the team would have morning meetings where they participated a team building exercise.
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“The bridge itself brings a mind shift, a system change,” Turrini said. "People decide to invest more in their things because they know that they have safe access to the other side of the river no matter what. No matter which weather, no matter which day of the year, no matter rainy season or dry season, they are able to go to the market and sell those products — so they invest more in their crops in order to sell more.”
Sending in foreign engineers to work on these projects has an added publicity and awareness benefit. Those who help build a bridge abroad can travel back home, share their experiences and maybe even inspire others to get involved and work on other projects.
“Rwanda has a huge need for hundreds of more bridges like this one,” said Costigan.
He hopes that spreading the word about the program and the work Bridges to Prosperity is doing will attract more engineers to assist in building another bridge.
Jim Costigan, engineer on the bridge project in Rwanda, takes a selfie with children from a local school in May 2024.
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While the Bridges to Prosperity model does construct physical bridges in the community, they also bridge connections with locals. They work through language barriers by attempting to participate in and learn about local life as facilitated by the drivers who took them from their accommodations to the construction site each day and were fluent in both the local language as well as English.
“Our drivers, Jimmy and Brilliant, were great at sharing local culture,” said Stratton.
This experience included local music. Every morning, once they got to the job site, the group participated in a team-building exercise which involved Rwandan call and response style singing. After a few days, Costigan created one for the American team as well.
“We followed their social norms," he said. "By the end of the two-week period, our stoic American hard faces were just melted away.”