Question: do you feel like people take advantage of you work, or do you feel like people respect your work for how many lives yo have changed?

Ken Gibbs answered on 14 Mar 2012:

@katy: Probably a bit of both. I like to think that the government in the country in which I am working, appreciate what I have been doing as it reduces the number of people dying unnecessarily. But when you look at the people who actually get to use the pump (or latrine) that is provided through the programme, they show their appreciation much more directly.

Now here’s an interesting aspect of the work I did. In Bangladesh, an economics professor from Chittagong wanted to bring banking to rural women and he created the Grameen Bank which has become world famous. Check out Mohammed Yunus or the Grameen Bank on Wikipedia. Well, Prof Yunus came to me and asked me if he could have a lot of pumps for his bank ? I though it was quite an odd request (was he taking advantage of me, I wondered ?) but he persisted so I gave him 20 pumps so he could show how they would benefit rural women and the Grameen Bank. 9 months later he was back for more having used those pumps as a “loan” each of which was fully repaid within the 9 month period. Naturally, he got a lot more after that. Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank jointly went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Don’t let anyone tell you that engineering is dull !