Ellis Robinson is obsessed with bikes.
So it was a perfect fit when he discovered Mayapedal, a non-governmental organization that provides bikes and bicycle-powered machines to a small Guatemalan community.
Robinson, a fifth-year senior in mechanical engineering, joined five other Ohio State students who volunteered to spend three weeks in December in San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala, building and repairing bicycle-powered machines and educating the community about them.
The team of engineers, which also included Eric Reynolds, Joe Belisle, Jordan Blimbaum and Alex Hissong, built two machines for the Mayapedal workshop. One was a bicycle-powered water pump that a man bought for home use. He had access to city water, but the bicycle pump was more reliable.
“There’s a lot of unpredictable electricity shortages,” Robinson said. “It happens often enough that it was worth it for him to have a bicycle pump.”
They also built a portable electricity generator for a car battery that charged on a downhill-moving bike, which was a replacement for a stationary-bike generator.
“A lot of people bike into town, and it’s all downhill,” said Melanie Miller, a graduate student in rural sociology who was also a member of the team. “Instead of sitting at home peddling like crazy, they could actually capture all of that energy of coasting down the mountain.”
Other bicycle-powered machines included a washing machine, a coffee grinder and a plow.
The team agreed that a machine that removed kernels from ears of corn was the most impressive. It even had an adjusted seat to accommodate the women of the town, about half of whom wear a traditional Mayan skirt that make a normal bike seat uncomfortable. Miller actually bought the outfit and tried to ride a bike with it.
“It’s never occurred [to the men] that it’s hard to ride a bike with a long skirt,” she said.
Carlos Machán, director of Mayapedal, said a lot of the machines helped women work quickly, using power from their legs as opposed to their arms. Without the machines, he said, women would have wasted a lot of time. The washing machine, for example, turned a six-hour chore into a 30-minute task.
In addition to building machines for the community, the team also visited owners of the machines to teach them about simple repairs, although Miller said all of the machines seemed to be made well and none had broken. The team also had a community day at the Mayapedal workshop where they taught people how to ride and care for bikes.
Miller was the cultural expert of the team and had a different strength than the engineers – after spending years in Latin America, she spoke fluent Spanish.
“Having Melanie, a non-engineer, made us infinitely well-rounded,” Robinson said.
The team had been planning with Mayapedal throughout Fall Quarter and prepared by repairing bikes with Columbus’ Third Hand Bicycle Co-op.
The team said the lesson they learned was the importance of including social and cultural elements into machine designs.
“Something like [sitting on] a seat with a Mayan skirt is not taught in an engineering classroom, but you need to take it into account,” Robinson said.
Stephanie Webber can be reached at [email protected].
