Amy Bowen, a December 2006 graduate of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, did discipline-specific mission work in Kenya in 2005 and 2006, each time for two weeks. Now she has an internship position with the National Renewable Energy Lab in Denver, Colorado, which she hopes will turn into full-time employment.

"I fell in love with the idea of wind energy from my Kenya experience," says Bowen. "It's equally appropriate for rural and urban settings—applicable to everyone and affordable."

Amy and three other students formed a student-led organization to bring their engineering skills overseas through mission work. "The first time, when we went to the largest slum in Kenya, called Kibera, I was petrified," she says. "Almost a million people live there in extreme poverty—I wanted to walk away from it. When I processed it and realized what we could do there, I wanted to go back. Even if I couldn't make a big dent, I knew I could share the love of Jesus with a few people."

In 2005, Bowen and her team installed a solar panel, lights, and a laptop computer at the Kenyan Christian School for the Deaf. They taught five students how to use the computer system, with translation help from another team doing sign language. The engineering team designed and built rechargeable lights using LEDs (light-emitting diodes), clustering and setting them in a plastic resin.

The second time, Bowen's team partnered with an international nongovernmental agency. They had learned to build latrines around the slum and used methane generated by the waste materials to heat water.

Bowen was a new Christian of a couple of years when she went overseas, trying to understand how she could make her faith more tangible. She says, "I found that when I was doing something the Lord was leading me to do, and caring for the poorest of the poor, I felt at peace with what I was doing. As much as I liked going to school, it felt selfish. I felt good about what I was doing and what I was becoming as I was doing things for other people. I hadn't imagined it would be like it was."