MIT meets Peruvian orphans and farmers- an unlikely but good fit

For the past week I have been been playing a bit part in facilitating a student-faculty team from MIT called "D-Lab" who are in Peru for 3 weeks. Their technological answers to improving life in places like Haiti, Africa, and right here in Peru are intriguing. Their reasoning for doing so is compelling.

First, here is a snapshot of what D-Lab is and does from the NY Times this past September

Then here is a longer NY Times Magazine article about Amy Smith, which describes her and explains her philosophy better than I could hope to

And here is a video about the charcoal project

So they have a lot of interesting low-tech engineering solutions for the developing world; where Peru comes in is with the applications. I basically have been plugging them into the places here in Lima where they can help, and in the end Lima sure does seem like a good fit. A good fit because they are a group of anti-high-technology engineers, and high tech is not doable (dare I say "sustainable"?) in the developing world. High does not mean appropriate, high tech does not mean that it works.

It has been like showing around a group of low-tech groupies, meant completely as a compliment. Their first question when they arrived after an overnight flight was where to find the street market metalworking shops- they wanted to personally see what materials were available and whether the local craftsmen could duplicate several of their simple machines. Technology is only truly transferred if it can be made and repaired locally. On the way we stopped to take pictures of every bicycle and rolling knife sharpener we passed- Gwyndaf, who had retired after selling the high-end bicycle frame company he started, has been converting bicycles into pedal powered things as different as corn huskers and washing machines, and being around him is like listening in on a mobile brainstorming session. After the craftsmen were visited, we met with an NGO that services tens of thousands of farmers and helps teach them how to do business; Amy showed them the bicycle powered corn husker, their water purification method by simply leaving it in the sun, and about a dozen more neat solutions. The team is now going to Cuzco, a town near Machu Pichu, to demo their things and figure out if their tech fits a need and can be adapted to local circumstances (such as whether their peanut sheller can be adapted to shelling a local nut).

Next we went to a massive orphanage about an hour and a half outside of Lima- it has 600 children from all over Peru and basically sits on the side of a sand hill in a desert. After being swarmed by about 50 little children who politely lined up to greet us (hand shakes for the boys and cheek kiss for the girls), the first thing I noticed was that an adult and 3 or 4 boys were welding together a rabbit cage out of rebar and chicken wire- they were trying to raise more rabbits for food. The home, named Comunidad de Ninos Sagrada Familia (Community of Children Sacred Family) struggles to keep everyone fed and clothed because it both gets no government support and does not turn kids away (video interview with English translations below). With 600 mouths to feed, the biggest cost is food e.g. they eat about 3,000 biscuits per DAY and buying flour is twice as expensive as buying the grain would be. Just so happens that Amy did her masters thesis on making low cost electric mills that could cut that huge expense in half. With nothing more than a few oil drums full of corn cobs (which I had an interesting time dumpster diving for in the market the week before), the team spent 2 days showing a group of older boys at the home how to turn corn cobs and any other organic waste into charcoal, which could be sold at the market or used to cook the bread for the children. Washing clothes by hand for 600 kids is also very labor intensive, and so the pedal powered laundry machine would be a perfect fit as well, and the dirty water could be put into drip-irrigation gardens that could be made on the sandy hill of the home. After all of the project talk and demos, the MIT crew went through the several buildings of the community and was repeatedly swarmed with attention-hungry cute kids, from the 2 year olds wanting to be held to the teenagers practicing their English. That is one reason that this was a good fit- making the home more economically stable lets them do what they know how to do well. Technology and economics are what enables the important things to be done, and the goal is always really the people.

On the way out of Sagrada Familia we found two turtles in the pitifully small garden with string leashes passing through their pierced shells. I asked the children if the turtles would eat the plants and why the obvious pets were there. No, they only ate bananas. They were there because they were the only thing that two children brought with them when they came to the orphanage from the Amazon- they were family too. In this small observation I saw children being raised to understand that what is important in life are relationships and taking responsibility for those relationships.

The D-Lab is something special and unique because they are not letting political borders get in the way of their relationships or our responsibilities.

Here is the story about how Sagrada Familia started by its founder, Miguel Rodriguez