What would you do if the UPS delivered a CAT scan machine to your home? Unless you’re a medical professional, it would be unfamiliar technology and you wouldn’t have a clue what to do with it. You would need someone to show you how it worked and train you. When Floyd began construction on the AIDs hospice in Nkungi village, he ran into a similar problem of introducing technology that the locals had never seen: a sawhorse and a mortar box.
The Sawhorses
“Think about it this way: look at your shoes,” Floyd says. “What if you’d never seen a pair of shoes and someone gave you a pair. What would you do? I faced the same problem in Nkungi. I asked them if they had a sawhorse and they didn’t know what I was talking about; they had never seen a sawhorse or a mortar box. You don’t know what you don’t know.”
For those of us in America with all of the modern conveniences and latest technology, it’s hard to imagine there are parts of the world that don’t have the simple things we take for granted.
All construction workers know that sawhorses are basic and very useful equipment. Floyd, who was accustomed to power saws, set about building a set of sawhorses using a handsaw to cut miter joints and a screwdriver as a chisel to create mortises.
“The people in the village had centuries-old building methods and had no idea how to make it easier,” Floyd says. “The tools are made of cheap materials and if left laying on the ground and they step on them, they ruin them. However, after we built the first set of sawhorses, they drove nails on the ends of the sawhorses and hung the TOOLS there.”
The Mortar Box
Once the sawhorses were built, the next piece of equipment needed was a mortar box in which to mix cement. The way people had mixed cement was to scrape the grass off the ground, start with nine shovels of sand, three shovels of aggregate, three shovels of cement and blend them then form a depression in the middle of the material, add water and mix with a shovel. Obviously, this is not an efficient way to mix mortar for laying blocks, but it had worked for centuries.
“We took an old hospital bed and removed the flat metal portion from the pipe frame,” Floyd says. “We didn’t have a welder so we nailed the pieces to two-by-twelve’s with beveled ends as sides to make the first mortar box for the village. I asked our friend, Sammy Makala, what the men thought of them and he said, ‘they like the new technology.’ Something as simple as a set of sawhorses and a mortar box made work easier, increased productivity and helped maintain equipment.”
Implementing Technology Appropriate to the Culture
In order to help people who live in impoverished areas, the transfer of technology, regardless of how simple it may be, is critical for their success. However, that technology must be appropriate for the local culture. For example, there are 22 million acres of land in Tanzania that are arable, which means you can grow crops on it. Of those 22 million acres, 60 percent are still being farmed by hand, 25 percent are farmed with animals (oxen pulling a plow) and 15 percent with mechanized equipment.
Therefore, any mechanization introduced must be appropriate to the area. This concept is referred to as appropriate scale mechanization.If you shipped a large tractor with equipment to many of these areas it simply would not work because there are no parts available or trained mechanics to repair them when they break down.
Although Floyd had a shop full of construction equipment at his home in Iowa, that equipment – even if he had taken it to Tanzania – would have been of little use for one simple reason: the lack of electricity.
Good Intentions are not Enough
Any assistance provided to people in developing countries must be appropriate to their culture or it won’t work after those providing assistance have gone home. Good intentions must be combined with thoughtful consideration and conversation as to the best way to truly help with long-term solutions.
It’s been 15 years since Floyd helped them build sawhorses and a mortar box. They’re still using the new technology.
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Here are the previous Chapters:
Destination Tanzania – Chapter 1
