Some Village Innovation

Innovation is bred from necessity I thought.  As it turns out, it is also bred from laziness (in my case), through mimicry, and, as I mentioned above, through necessity.  Here are three examples of innovation that I've come across in the village.  

The first is my beloved bike plow.  Made from an old bicycle frame, fitted with a locally made plow, and pushed (not pedaled) the bike plow in some cases can make cultivating a field 75% faster.  That means a task that may take 2 days can be completed in about 4 hours.  This is not only great for time management and efficiency, but the conventional method of using a hoe is tiresome on a back - the plow allows the user to stand straight up.  

So far people are very excited about this new innovation and if only a couple people out of the 100+ that have seen it use it then I'll be really happy and content.

Showing the bike plow to some local farmers and village headmen.

This next one was amazing to come across.  It's a rain water harvest system that then acts as a flush toilet - something I had never seen in the village.  Here's how this one works:

Water runs off the roof, into a gutter and then slides down into a water holding tank.  The villager comes with a pale, transfers the water to an elevated tank where it sits until a user flushed the toilet inside the brick structure.  I've never seen or even heard of anything like this before.  This is maybe my favorite example of village innovation.

The water moves off the roof, into the gutter and down into the vertical tank.  Water is then transferred to the horizontal, elevated tank and used in the flushing process.  The toilet is in the brick structure.

My third example is something that can even be done in America.  It's called manure tea and it's a smelly, wonderful idea.  Using water, a mesh like bag full of animal manure and a few days of soaking, this mixture can provide gardeners with nutrient-rich water for use on their crops.  Although hard to "scale  up" and use in large-scale fields, it's easy to create and implement in the garden.  

Because fertilizer here is very expensive for villagers to buy, this method allows farmers to use materials that are commonly found around their homes and villages: water, manure from the livestock they keep, and a simple water container.

PCV Caleb Rudow and PC Staffer Henry Chilufya hold up a manure tea bag that a local health clinic was using to supplement their crops' needs for nutrients.

I'll keep adding different innovations that I find throughout the next few months.  It's so interesting to see and be apart of, because in America we often go to a store to solve our issues, but here creativity is king due to a lack of resources, like stores and money.