Michelle Hinton of Ledyard works for Balfour Beatty Communities, one of the nation’s largest owners and managers of residential housing with a portfolio including multifamily, military and student communities.

One day she received a company email that said “Do you want to go to Bolivia and build a bridge?” A total of 161 employees of Balfour Beatty nationwide expressed an interest in this project.

Interviews were conducted over Skype, and for hers Hinton wore a hard hat, safety goggles and held a jug of water. She started her interview by saying, “Hola, I’m ready to go!”

Asked if she had ever built a bridge, she said yes, turning her computer and showing off a bridge she built out of Legos. The interviewers laughed, and she was in after a personality test and written essay to make sure personalities clicked because this team was going to be living, eating and working together for 18 days.

The team originally was supposed to travel to Bolivia. Unfortunately, about two weeks before the trip her group was re-routed to Rwanda.

“It was a safer place,” she said, “and there was a need there as well.”

Balfour Beatty partnered with a group called Bridges to Prosperity, based in Colorado.

“They based the needs out of where people are either being hurt, injured or killed,” she added.

When Hinton first told people she was going to Central Africa to build a bridge, they thought she was going to build a relationship bridge between people of Rwanda and America. She told them that she was actually going to be building the bridge with hammers and nails.

Hinton had no knowledge of construction at all — zero, despite working for a builder. She said everyone on her team was qualified in construction, but she saw herself more as a cheerleader and caretaker.

Finally 20 people were chosen, with 10 going to one part of Rwanda and the others off to another section of the country. Both teams went to build bridges.

The site where Hinton was sent stood three hours into the jungle, where villagers were using a little footbridge to get to market to sell or buy their produce; children used the same footbridge to get to school.

“Since June that one footbridge had been washed out three times ... and people are still trying to cross the river to get to school and to market and they are dying,” she said. “The children, adults, cattle and goats are all dying trying to cross the river. ... The children are still trying to get to school and they are holding their bags over their heads as they try to cross the river and the water is up to their chins ‑ it is so heartbreaking.”

Building the bridge were members of the Rwandan community, varying between 10 and 30 people. Hinton desribed them as “very poor and with hearts of gold.”

Villagers didn’t speak English, so the team had to give instructions through rudimentary sign language or drawing in the sand.

“Some of the paths were very muddy and very slippery,” she said.

Donations received through social media requests were used to purchase bolts, wood and other items needed for the bridge. Members of the team took their own supplies, hammers, drills and screwdrivers, leaving them in Rwanda when they were finished.

“We left everything behind because that was the plan,” Hinton said.

She gave her steel toe boots to a mother of eight. Her pillow, sleeping bag, manual fan, toys, socks ‑ everything, whether dirty or clean, was given away.

“The team did their exercises every morning as a group and while they did this, the village children would come and watch,” Hinton said. “The children were fascinated with bubbles and Frisbees.”

Hinton brought pipe cleaners and made friendship bracelets out of them. The children and adults wanted them and were amazed. The next day a boy made glasses out of the pipe cleaners.

“The basic things in life that we take for granted like construction paper, they cherish,” she said.

Hinton met a man who was mesmerized by a Polaroid picture of himself. He had never seen a picture of himself before.

Hinton created a little game with the children in the village where every morning she would have the children make a fist and she would fist bump them and then say a high pitched Boooooooo as her hand extended out high into the air. The children could say Boooooooo and all of a sudden you would hear Boooooooo all across the valley because the adults would say it too.

In the village of 3,000, some homes were caves or stucco buildings with banana leaves for roofs. There was no electricity in 99% of the homes and no running water as well.

The team lived in a stucco home resembling a hut that had four rooms (not bedrooms, just four rooms). Furniture consisted of the 15 cots, 10 for the team and five for the cooks and translators. Fifteen people shared an outdoor shower, which was a basin with a bucket with cold water.

The hardest part for Hinton was the altitude. Every morning from their home they had to climb a mountain up 2 1/2 miles to the worksite. They worked from 7 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., then walked 2 1/2 miles down the mountain to the hut.

“The wood used for the bridge was eucalyptus, which is very heavy,” Hinton said. “Each plank weighed 44 pounds.”

Hinton’s team was there for 18 days and completed the bridge on day 16. The team built a very tall suspended bridge 165 feet long, 70 feet above the water and wide enough that a mother could hold two children’s hands and walk them across the bridge. Bicycles and mopeds could go across as well.

“We put fencing on each side of the bridge so that a toy or something does not fall through,” Hinton said. “We also painted the Rwandan colors and we had balloons on the bridge for opening day.”

An elder of the village was the first to cross.

“She didn’t know how to say thank you in English and so she placed her hands over her heart,” she said.

Hinton was chosen to say a speech on the bridge’s opening day. She spoke about friendship and how she didn’t even know the people on her team and didn’t know anyone in Africa and now she has nine new Balfour Beatty friends and she has this whole country of friends. Community members were chosen as keepers of the bridge to check on safety and the upkeep of the bridge.

Hinton said her work in Rwanda was the hardest and most rewarding of her life. She had to manually drill, make cement, hike with tools, and before this she didn’t even know what a drill bit was and didn’t know how to work a drill.

One of Hinton’s teammates told her, “Michelle, you came here knowing nothing, you didn’t know how to use a screwdriver, but you asked a million questions. You learned to use the drill and learned how to put a drill bit in, then you took it one step further — you taught the community members how to use the drill. You were exactly what we wanted, to learn and then to teach what you learned.”

Hinton made a very close friend in Rwanda, Summer from Charlotte, N.C. Hinton loved when they finally were able to go to market in Kigali, Rwanda, which is three hours away, and bought many souvenirs.

The team did get to go on a safari one day on their day off and saw an amazing number of animals including elephants and zebras. And they were also able to take a boat ride where they saw alligators and hippos.

“In Rwanda, they have a rule that on the last Saturday of every single month, every family has to volunteer one family member and they have to go out into the community and pick up litter, trim trees, help a neighbor with a project,” Hinton said. “When we arrived in Rwanda we arrived on Community Day. Wouldn’t it be great if we did this in Ledyard, or in our own neighborhood, or the town we live in?”

On her 22-hour plane ride home she thought of her experiences in Rwanda, how this community had nothing, wore the same clothes all week, yet they were so happy. Hinton said she thought about the gifts that she and other people have and said, “We aren’t teaching others. This is free that all of use can do — teach others. This experience made me realize things about myself that were totally out of my comfort zone and I want to start doing more and more projects to help others.”

Hinton said when she came home and she looked around her house she asked herself, “Why do I have all these knickknacks? There is no purpose. They (the people of Rwanda) see a purpose for things in their lives.”

That got her thinking some more.

“What makes us happy?” she asked. “Is it things, or is it experiences with people?”

Aidan Schuler of Ledyard is a student at the Williams School in New London. He is part of the Times’ Young Journalists Initiative.