Last January in Nicaragua, the ox-powered road biulding work of RELATA impressed Jim and Virlee Weaver, Dick Wheeler, Dick Roosenberg, and Susan Johnson. With the held of Jim Weaver and the Indianapolis Rotarians, Tillers is arranging a exchange visit by two to four of their design and technical staff. We hope the exchange will give them some innovative ideas for how they can expand their line of road building equipment.
The Abbey Collection has a number of slipscrapers, Fresno scrapers, trenching plows, and road graders. We will also demonstrate adaptive designs that we have built for other international projects. We will review these designs with them in search of low-cost technologies appropriate for small rural roads. We anticipate the team will be here for about two weeks, probably November 27 through March 8.
Jim Weaver and Dick Wheeler have volunteered to help with some group transportation. We will likely build and test some adaptive prototype tools, and we would love to have some volunteer wood and metal workers involved in that phase of the project. It is our goal to send some people down to Nicaragua in January-March to help repeat the tests there with a newer generations of local adaptations.
The group will have some English speaking abilities, but we may need some help with translations. Give us a call if you are interested in meeting some of these good people.
Even as the snow blew, our friends from Nicaragua and Honduras eagerly studied Tillers' animal-powered tools and practices. Ariel Espinoza and Jhovany Tinoco were driven by a list of priorities topped by more efficient methods for building rural roads. RELATA, their employer, networks Latin American animal traction projects. It nurtures the development of rural businesses that support small farmers. About 10 private metal shops are supported in each of three countries: Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. Last year the shops in Nicaragua built and sold 1,500 plows and nearly as many seeders. Most recently, RELATA has fostered the creation of tertiary rural road building crews to contract with municipalities to improve roads long ignored and eroded. These groups are drawn from low-income farmers with the employment generation support of CARE International. RELATA has helped form and equip 25 gropus in Nicaragua, 15 in Honduras, and a few in El Salvador. The tools include ox-drawn ripping plows, a two-wheeled grader, and a dump cart. The farmers provide the oxen and the manual labor. Several groups have built more than 20 kilometers of roadway. CARE finds the animal-powered work is far more tolerable and much faster than handwork.
Upon the arrival of Ariel and Jhovany, we quickly showed them Tillers' array of excavating tools and the Abbey Collection. By the next morning, they had revised their list of priorities for us to work on.
Indeed, each morning from November 28th to December 6th, they had refined or added new objectives, as well as more layers of clothing. The core learning goals emerged as identifying additional road building implements that were low-cost and effective, finding horse collar and harness designs to reduces sores and injuries to animals, solving the problem farmers are experiencing in plowing water catching trenches on sloping fields, designing a better animal-drawn garbage hauling system, selecting animal-powered planting and weeding implements to meet the needs of medium-sized farms, and visualizing new long-term means for training and inspiring RELATA staff.
Ariel is a coordinator of project development. Jhovany designs tools, develops production jigs, and trains the artisans at cooperating metal shops. They both have the ability to appraise the effectiveness of tools and the practicality of manufacturing them locally on limited budgets. They are also committed to making their program work. It was a thrill for Tillers' volunteers and staff to work with them. In spite of our language barriers, they learned quickly and shared many witty observations.
Duane Westrate responded to the challenge of improving horse harnessing. He spent a number of hours over four days helping them learn about good harness and how it affects driving horses. He took them to Amish harness shops, wagon makers, and farms for a little extra inspiration. Both Jhovany and Ariel were impressed with the Amish sense of family and community. Their feeding methods and dairy refrigeration without the use of electricity perked their interests as well.
As a reader of the Nigh Ox, Jim Hutchison called to volunteer his skills as a road builder. He and his wife Connie drove from Rockford, Illinois, and spent a night in the Carroll Abbey Guest House between road-building discussions and demos. He brought very low-cost but effective transits to site level grades along roadways. While it was Jim's first time working graders behind horses, he teamed up with Duane to put on a very professional demonstration. The practical knowledge he has of roads was readily apparent. In addition to giving Ariel and Jhovany suport for the challenges of building roads without John Deere equipment, Jiim enjoyed working early tools like the slip scrapers drawn by oxen.
Jim and Duane added a lot of expertise where Tillers' staff was weak and a group of six volunteers covered for staff weakness in Spanish. They did it on short notice and most generously.
Jim and Virlee Weaver had the vision and willingness to present the promise of this exchange to the Rotary Club of Indianapolis where Jim is a past president. They covered Tillers' "out-of-pocket" expenses. Tillers was delighted to be able to give a full committment of staff time and Guest House lodging.
In January, as the next step in developing this exchange, Jim Weaver and Dick Wheeler will join Dick Roosenberg on a follow-up trip to Nicaragua and Honduras to help Ariel and Jhovany as they build and test the selected prototypes. Tillers' Fall Appeal is helping cover costs of materials for the project.
The selection of road grading rools included a grading tool that we call the Martin Ditcher, a slip-scraper with a rounded cutting edge, a stone boat, and a wood-framed grader with blades at off-set angles. In addition, Ariel and Jhovany are eager to build a garbage hauling system designed around forecarts and light gooseneck trailers.
As they prepared to leave, they stuffed horse harness parts in their bags and packed a dozen books and videos to add to RELATA's library of training materials. RELATA is computer empowered, which enabled them to take a PowerPoint report on the exchange and copies of 150 digital images that they shot with Tillers' camera. All this fit on a little ZIP disc. The visual report should facilitate the task of convincing others that there still are low-cost technologies within farm communities and the rurla history of the United States that are appropriate to internaitonal development.
Tillers looks forward to continuing to support the work of RELATA and especially to helping these bright and committed young professionals meet the challenges facing them.
"Field Testing Road Building Tools for Animal Traction," Nigh Ox April 2001
"Rapid transfer of technology" is what Ariel Espinoza dubbed our exchange with RELATA on animal powered road building equipment. From seeing adaptable implement ideas in Kalamazoo to field testing prototypes on a road in Honduras was only 53 days! Tucked into the process that occurred in those days are many gems of wisdom on international development.
Before leaving Kalamazoo in December, Ariel and Giovanny Tinoco offered to construct the prototype ditcher by our arrival in mid-January. We offered to help them build a slipscraper and a simple two-blade floating road grader when we arrived in Nicaragua.
In January, the project sponsors, Jim Weaver and Dick Wheeler of Indianapolis joined Dick Roosenberg. Carolyn Such, a former Peace Corps volunteer to Guatemala, helped with translations.
Ariel drove the group up to Honduras where Giovanny has a shop and teaches at a national vocational training facility called INFOP. On arrival in Tegucigalpa, we were delightfully surprised to find Giovanny and his assistant Marden standing by not only the promised ditcher, but also the slipscraper and the grading float. They were so enthused by the potential of the road building tools that they had finished the set. The design replications and adaptations were implemented with excellent skill. While you could still smell the new paint on the tools, it was dry!
They probably would have tested them in the dark of that Tuesday evening if they had a team of oxen in downtown Tegucigalpa. However, on Wednesday they treated the group to a farm tour to see mini-terracing being done very effectively with a single horse. The farmer was impressed with the increased water retention of his hillside fields with the terraces. The slope was probably nearing 40%, and the terraces were too narrow for a team of oxen to work. Moreover, light horses are now less expensive than oxen and kept by many farmers for riding anyway. The farmer was delighted at how quickly he was able to work the field with a simple ard in comparison to the hand hoeing that he had previously done. And as a consequence of the terracing and improved water retention, he was able to plant a second crop and each yielded nearly double previous yields. RELATA is searching for ways to hitch these light horses more effectively and to establish the terraces more efficiently.
On Wednesday, several RELATA staff members, including the coordinator for Honduras, Roque David Almendarez, joined Ariel and Giovanny to test the road building equipment. They started with the ditcher, which was expected to address one of the more difficult road improvement tasks. The 40 teams they now have working in the two countries use a grader design that is not appropriate for the roughness of the task. It requires two people just to hold it into the line of the ditch being dug. Ariel was first to guide the new ditcher behind the team of oxen provided by Don Pedro, one of the farmers who works on a rural road maintenance team. Even though Ariel has tested the historical tool in Kalamazoo at Tillers, he was all smiles as he waved for the ox driver to stop so he could look back at how the ditcher had pushed a ridge of soil out from the ditch.
After Giovanny and Roque took a turn on it, Roque summarized his impressions: its construction cost is about half the prior tool, the labor requirment is 2/3 since only one person is needed to guide it, and it more more soil with less chance of breakdown. In addition, everyone was delighted that the operator guided it with his balance rather than by fatiguing body force. For the Tillers group, there was little criticism to give. We were as excited as they to finally see the promising old ditcher design of Mr. Martin revitalized. It was great to have been able to capture the test on video to help convince other project of the viability of the tool and animal-powered road-work.
Then the floating grader was put to the test. The road surface was hard and rocky, but the spring steel used on the wooden frame moved the gravel and clay raised from the ditch by the ditcher on into the road and dropped it into the pot holes that were on the crown of the road way. Giovanny had added a gauging handle to the traditional design that he had seen at Tillers. It permits the operator to lift the rear blade to release a little extra soil at times. It worked well, though Giovanny will probably bend the handle so it can be reached by the operator more easily.
Finally, the team of oxen pulled the new slipscraper over to where Don Pedro had broke some hard soil with his horse and ard. After Ariel and Giovanny demonstrated how the scraper loads and dumps with varying lifts of the handles, Marden tried his hand at it. On the first try, he had the soil overflowing the backside of the scraper bucket. The placement of the hitch point on the pan is fairly sensitive. If too high, the scraper becomes unstable in loading. If too low, it is more difficult to dump. Giovanny and Marden had placed it well.
After the test, Ariel was talking to Giovanny about coming down to Nicaragua to teach some local metal shops how to build three more sets of the tools to test out with the road crews. After taking the Tillers group back to Nicaragua, Ariel presented Tillers with a proposal to collaborate on finding more tools to answer other challenges of the farmers. The Ministry of Agriculture is particularly interested in finding tools for what they consider their mid-sized farmers who could afford better equipment but cannot afford tractors yet.
Tillers staff was impressed with the positive effect of the terracing efforts seen with RELATA at Ebenezer Ranch on soil and water conservation. The same equipment that was tested for road work could be adapted to speed terracing and to build water catchment ponds. We are excited about testing these ideas in future collaborations nad this summer in Wykoff, Minnesota, during our International Development class.
Working with the dedicated and enthusiastic staff of RELATA was inspiring to Tillers' staff. We are excited about the possibility of having a couple of them up for the last part of June. We want them to have a chance to see some of our adaptations of traditional oxen and horse powered tools.
"Tillers and First Baptist Collaborate for Health and Education" by Rachel Bemis, Nigh Ox June 2001
In March several volunteers and Tillers staff joined efforts with the First Baptist Church of Kalamazoo for a second annual work trip to Nicaragua. There were 11 in our group: Don, Rachel and Andrew Bemis, Carol and Kris Svenson, John Sarge, Rick Gutierez, Cyula Ficsor, Pat Wentworth, George, and Ben Jameson.
I was on my way from the latrine to the truck, thinking how nice it would be to crawl into my sleeping bag beneath the mosquito net and get some much-needed rest, when three young girls kidnapped me. They grabbed my fingers and pulled me off into the dark, babbling as fast as only children can, much too fast for me to translate a word of their Spanish. Eventually they stopped, and after a few seconds my eyes adjusted to the light of a single candle in a room. It appeared this was the girls' house, and it was full of people. It didn't take much longer to realize they were all staring at me. The girls giggled and their mother motioned me to the empty chair in the light of a candle. I sat down. They told me to speak. And so we spoke. We spoke of families, of schools, of hte drought, the animals, the new health clinic we were helping to stucco. We spoke of churches and faith, of similarities and differences. We spoke of language and farming and Tillers. "This," I thought to myself, "is what Tillers is about." Tillers' passion is for sharing knowledge, understanding, and skills, especially in helping aid development efforts. It is fascinating to do this here in Kalamazoo, and it is amazing to have the opportunity to share on-site in Nicaragua.
The first week we spent a couple of days in Managua at the PROVADENIC headquarters for orientation before heading up to Quebrada Grande, a rural village just south of Honduras. We were there to help work on the community's helath clinic; I'm not sure how much help we were, since the local men had much more experience in mixing cement and stuccoing than we probably ever will, they they were thrilled that we were there and we were equally thrilled to spend time getting to know them. We did finish the project before we left, and more than that, Tillers' work in Nicaragua is helping to bring organizations and people together in order that each might be a resource to the others.
Right now, Tillers is working primarily with three groups in Nicaragua: RELATA, PROVADENIC, and Rancho Ebenezer. PROVADENIC is a vaccination and health care project that began in 1967. PROVADENIC works closely with ProFamilia (a family planning organization) and Rancho Ebenezer. Rancho Ebenezer is a farm dedicated to raising small animals and teaching people to care for them, conducting careful research to improve farming methods and education. It is at Ebenezer that some of our group stayed an additional week to teach blacksmithing. Tillers International is in a unique position to be able to partner with each of these groups in Central America to enhance the work they have already begun. At the same time, Tillers learns from their experience and research.
I hope to be able to return next year. It was a terrifying moment of realization when I was asked to speak in a dim room full of people, in a language I don't use particularly well. However, learning is not a function of how well a language is understood; it is a function of how well people and ideas are understood. With each trip we learn more and are better equipped to teach. May our work in Nicaragua continue.
In the wake of the Nicaraguan elections and just before Thanksgiving, Tillers traveled to Matagalpa, Nicaragua to work with the Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa. The Colectivo purchased a farm outside Matagalpa recently and Julietta Martinez became the farm manager a few months ago. She invited Tillers down to help set up a garden with drip irrigation, and welcomed us to teach a one-day workshop in blacksmithing.
Upon arrival, John Sarge, Dulcy Perkins, and Wendy and Christoff Hoashi-Erhardt were give a tour of the Colectivo and what it does. The Colectivo was started in 1986 and has several different departments, including education, which broadcasts a radio program, has a library, and does educational theatrical presentations in surrouding communities, a legal department which helps counsel people on domestic violence, divorce, and child support issues among other things, and a health department that trains health promoters to work in neighboring communities, works with midwives to detect at risk pregnancies, promotes family planning, and nutrition.
The group was out at the farm the next day digging large rocks out of the future garden site. After the beds were dug up and compost added to the soil, the bucket kits with drip tape were laid out. Although rainfall is more predictable in that area than further north, there is a dry season. Chapins Water Matic makes a low cost drip tape that utilizes elevated five gallon buckets to effectively irrigate without large amounts of water, allowing for year round gardening. They were fortunate to have electricity at teh farm house, and John helped Julietta string wire down to a well for a pump that will bring water to the house and garden.
Julietta had worked with Mark Hare from Ebenezer Ranch over the summer to establish some SALT terracing to raise a crop of beans and corn without losing the topsoil on the steep hillsides. With this technique, wide terraces are made and contoured perennial hedges are planted as permanent erosion control. Crops are rotated between these to ensure nutrients aren't lost. The group discussed the use of draft power to help with the terracing, and using compost to help replenish organic matter in the soil.
In the following days, tools to use int eh blacksmithing class were gathered up, including a discarded frame section from a semi-tractor for a free-standing anvil. Saturday, seventeen people from the collective, health promoters, actors, lawyers, and two young boys came out to the farm. John taught them first about metals and how to identify the type of metal best suited to a specific use. Soon they were hammering out a set of simple tongs. There was a discussion after the class about logistics, and mostly about future classes. The participants all thought that the potential of teaching blacksmithing, either to people who would become tradesmen or to those who would in turn teach people of surrounding communities, would have a good impact on the economy adn the financial independence of the people.
The Colectivo also works with Colectivo de Tejidos El Chile, a weavers group headed by Marta Ruiz that makes and sells satchels and hand bags. Dulcy traveled to El Chile with several women from the Colectivo including three health promoters who went to learn how to weave. Several looms of varying simplicity were set up, and Marta showed them techniques of threading the looms and weaving. The Colectivo de Mujeres plans on purchasing looms to have in Matagalpa so more women living in the city can participate in this cottage industry.
The Theatre promoters were getting ready for the Campaign Against Violence Towards Women and Children. The Tillers group was recruited to help make props for the parade. John and Dulcy helped make stilts while other children and adults worked on banners, a paper mache woman, horse, and turtle, and Chinese dragon-style earthworms.
John, Wendy, and Dulcy went to find the RELATA office in Matagalpa and found a branch of it, the Union Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos. They spoke with UNAG officials, Juan Guerrero Diaz and Damary Rivera Pineda, about what UNAG does, and to see if Tillers' work could complement theirs. UNAG also works in the communities surrounding Matagalpa, and their focus is to get not just one farmer, but whole communities to adopt good farming practices. UNAG, they found out, was having an ox training demonstration that day, and has one a year generally in March or April.
This exploratory trip was a great opportunity to meet and work with the Colectivo de Mujeres de Matagalpa. Tillers looks forward to future collaboration with the Colectivo and hopes to return in the spring. Special thanks to Christoff and Wendy for their interpretation, and to all of the people at the Colectivo for their hospitality.
Editor's Note: Jim is a member of Tillers' Board of Directors. He has gone to Nicaragua each of the last four Januarys. This year, John Sarge joined him from Tillers' staff. Dick Wheeler, Carolyn Such, and Jim's wife Virlee also participated as volunteers. Carolyn was a Peace Corps volunteer to Guatemala and helped with translations. All the group members have taken classes at Tillers to build skills.
The Indianapolis Tillers group returned from Managua in late January and unanimously agreed that we had a successful trip this year. In terms of specific accomplishments, we think this was the best of our trips in the last four years.
We spent most of our time working with Julietta at the Woman's Cooperative and at the farm. Their caretaker Lenin has done a good job of taking care of the tools we brought down in the past. It appeared that all the tools were still there, and they have been using many of them. Lenin told us that with the drills and bits we had sent down last year, they made some Chinese checkerboards and generated enough profit to buy 12 laying hens, a rooster, and build a pen for them.
This chicken coop is just below the sloped area where the blacksmith classes had been held. The blacksmith bellows that Dick Wheeler and I made last year were not as serviceable as we hoped they would be. So this year we tried building a wooden rotary bellows similar tot he one at Tillers (by Dave Kramer). We bought local parts at a bicycle repair place and completed everything except the final drive belt. Hopefully, this will be more serviceable than the bellows we made last year.
We left Tillers' contribution for the new blacksmith shop instruction building with Julietta. Additionally, Dick Wheeler and Carolyn Such contributed to the project.
Julietta organized several high school students to attend blacksmithing and woodworking classes at the farm. We only had a day of blacksmithing. In woodworking, we went through the basics of measuring, laying out, and cutting, and built three toolboxes and a workbench. We rip sawed by hand several eight-foot wet pine boards to build workbenches and tool carrying boxes. The young men did exercises to sharpen chisels, planes, and saws, and noticed the dramatic improvement of sharp tools. We filmed each of the young men explaining the projects completed. Although they spoke very little English, and we spoke only a little more Spanish, we were able to communicate quite well.
Tentatively, we plan to return in 2004 and, at Julietta's suggestion, we will go the last two weeks of January rather than earlier in the month. I'd like to attend another week of language school and teach classes in woodworking and metal working at the farm the other week. Carolyn will be able to put our written material in Spanish and that should be helpful for the students.
It was good to have John Sarge with us and to get to know him better. He was very much at home in Nicaragua and has much better Spanish skills than he lets on. Hopefully, he will be able to join us on future trips.
Dick Wheeler, Carolyn Such, Virlee and I began a service project in Nicaragua in January of 2000. After our first trip in January of 2000, we couldn't say with confidence that we had made a real difference in anyone's life. We continued to return for two or three weeks in January of each year. In 2002, we began teaching basic woodworking classes to some teenage street kids using vintage hand tools that we collected in Indiana and took with us to Nicaragua. Over the years, we collected and took well over 1,000 pounds of hammers, saws, chisels, planes, drills, drill bits, files and sharpening stones to the site of our woodworking classes in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. This year, we managed to pack and carry an anvil and several blacksmith tools. Although the anvil exceeded the published weight limitation for checked baggage, American Airlines routinely checked all our bags and made no comment about our overweight bags. We just returned from our fifth trip and now we can begin to see some results from our woodworking and blacksmithing classes.
Here's an incident from our January, 2004 trip that affirmed the things we are doing there. Dick Wheeler and I had parked our truck on a street in the town of Matagalpa, Nicaragua while virlee, Carolyn and Jerry Zimmerman were in a store buying some souvenirs. As we were talking, a young man came up and began talking to us in Spanish. His name was Robinson, and he had been one of our woodworking students in 2003. He told us that he was now an independent contractor doing woodworking and home remodeling. He expressed his gratitude to us for teaching him woodworking, and as a result, he now has a job and is able to support himself. The next day, Robinson took off work and came to the farm where we were teaching and attended another day of class. He was a great example to some of the younger boys in the class and helped them realize that they, too, could become self-reliant and prosperous if they took advantage of the training we were providing.
Last year, one of our students from 2003 told us that he had made several Chinese checkerboards and sold them in the market. With the money that he made, he was able to buy a dozen chickens and materials to build a chicken pen. As a result, his family now has a continual supply of fresh eggs and occassional chicken meat.
Too often, we fail to see results from the things we do. I wanted to pass on some results that we now see and thank you for the prayers, words of encouragement and material assistance you have provided to make our Nicaragua trips possible. Peace, Jim and Virlee Weaver.
RELATA invited Dick Roosenberg to visit their Nicaragua program to see how the Martin Ditcher is working in their rural roads projects and to explore new tools to introduce into the road crews. They have added more aggressive replaceable edges to the ditcher and have added a second team of oxen to give it the power to work harder. Even in villages, it is known as the "niveladora Tillers."
RELATA and its crews have rehabilitated nearly 200 kilometers (120 miles) of country roads at about half the cost of doing the same work with heavy equipment. One of the best things is that most of the costs of this work goes directly to the local farmers who are working their oxen in the projects. It looks like they have developed the program to the point where they could put animal-drawn wheeled graders to good use. We are working together to find funding for the revision of the historical designs to take advantage of modern weld fabrication to keep the costs in line.
