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Since moving to Canada and the United States, Sierra Leone native and BWL engineer Donald Walters has remained connected to his communities back home and continues to give back with his time and financial support.

Every year or so, Donald tries to visit his home country to reconnect and make a positive impact, and he was able to do so at the end of 2023 and 2024. It takes about two full days to get to Sierra Leone, with transits in European cities like Amsterdam, Paris and Brussels, where he catches connecting flights to the capital city, Freetown.     

As soon as he’s back, he meets up with family, friends and colleagues, and tries to provide them lunch and dinner. Around Christmas time, he packages and personally hands out treats to children within the immediate neighborhood of his family house in Freetown. For the past couple of years before Christmas, Donald provides assorted food condiments, laundry soap bars and a mix of new and used clothes to his late mom’s rural village community.  

“It gives me great joy to be able to give back to the people of my heritage and to help their students with school fees and other necessities because I consider myself fortunate to have had a good education and exposure to a good life,” says Donald. 

In addition, Donald singlehandedly funded the construction of a new bathroom in 2024 to provide better sanitation for the same rural community. To help improve water quality and sanitation, Donald has been working on a plan to construct a water well to be equipped with a hand-operated pump, for which the funding is about $5,000. He’s excited that construction for the well began early March 2025, which will provide clean drinking water and eliminate the burden and health risk of fetching water from a stream when it’s finished.   

Donald is a Mechanical Engineer in the Project Engineering Department at BWL, with bachelor and graduate degrees from Sierra Leone and an MS in chemical engineering from Michigan State University. He has been at BWL for just over two and half years in Project Engineering working mainly on water production projects funded by the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund like the new water tower.   

“I have found that BWL is a great place to work, there’s so much flexibility and support within my department,” says Donald.