Question: What is the most rewarding part of your work?

Ken Gibbs answered on 11 Mar 2012:

Different parts of my work have given me different rewards.

For some years, I was in the business of providing handpumps to rural communities in Bangladesh. Just watching the faces of the people who finally get a safe water supply that works, right in their own village, has been one of the best rewards.

I am sure that my colleagues on “I’m an Engineer” will also say that finding an engineering solution to a technical problem can also be very rewarding. For instance, while working in Baluchestan (Pakistan), I was asked to change the way in which water supplies were being designed and built because they were – at that time – so expensive and often didn’t even put any water in the taps ! It appears that the work was so effective that even the World Bank required that my design-and-build system had to be used wherever their money was used for rural, piped water supplies in Pakistan. However, the best reward was that we were able to provide water supplies to far more people because the new system was so much less expensive than before, and was guaranteed always to have water in every tap.