I’ve
spent the last 2 years of my life pooping into a hole in the ground,
bathing out of a bucket, and boiling all of my drinking water; I’ve
spent the last 2 years of my life serving in the Peace Corps in Uganda.
Before coming here I had envisaged changing lives, curing diseases, and
saving babies. Now that I’ve been here I can safely say that I’m
capable, as it stands now, of doing none of these things. A little
digression: studying abstruse math and physics in college makes you a
little arrogant and entitled. I reasoned that devoting my life to purely
theoretical work would be alright because in the end it would still be a
contribution to some piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is science, and
thereby contribute to the world. This started to change in my last year:
I attended a colloquium about hypothetical universes as a function of
tuning the fundamental constants, i.e. what kind of universe would we
live in were the speed of light faster and the gravitational constant
larger (answer: we wouldn’t because in such a universe atomic bonds
wouldn’t form). Malarky! was the feeling I had at the end. This guy ate
up valuable grant money to study a scenario that would never be
possible, and even if it were it absolutely couldn’t be relevant (such a
region of the universe would be causally disconnected from ours). So I
joined the Peace Corps because I needed to re-evaluate whether I could
contribute, to anything in THIS universe, and I’ve had 2 experiences
that have shaped my perspective and will inform my future.
Uganda
is a strange place. There are 2 cell phones per person in this country
but most people don’t have access to clean drinking water. A suit and
tie is mandatory attire for the office and the field. Everyone has a
motorcycle but no one has a farm tractor, and there are zebu (cattle)
aplenty but no yokes to put them in; people till acres and acres of land
with plain hoes. Hence about 6 months in I had my first grandiose idea:
jerry-rig one of the Bajaj motorcycles, which are cheap and ubiquitous,
to pull a tiller. I thought it was going to be so easy; I’d worked on
my own motorcycles since I was 15, so I knew how to throw a wrench and
turn a hammer, and I had learned how to weld at a power-systems lab
internship in college. Blustering with all the hubris that comes from 4
years of studying the secrets of the universe, and charming my way into
cute college girls’ arms, I managed to convince my neighbor to let me
experiment on his motorbike, and a local blacksmith to let me use his
welder. What could go wrong? I completely winged it. I put together a
frame for two hoes welded together for the trowel, that hitched to the
motorbike by the rear-axle (making sure to add lots of triangles,
because I had learned that one of the secrets of the universe was that
triangles are super important), slapped some training wheels on it, and
rode off into the sunset. The next day I called my entire neighborhood
out to their communal farm, jumping out of my skin with anticipation of
impressing them with good ‘ol American ingenuity, and rode the
bike-tractor onto the field. They laughed a little, because that’s a
cultural mannerism here, but I knew better! I was going to blow their
minds. I started it up, made a big show of revving the engine, and took
off at a light trot. Everything was going swimmingly… for about 10
meters. Then I got stuck. I looked around, didn’t see any rocks or
serious obstructions, I figured I’d just hit a patch of really compacted
soil, so I reasoned as all great minds reason: more throttle = always a
good idea. The whine of the hamster wheel engine must have covered up
the sound of the straining cross-members, because I totally didn’t
expect that pop and I certainly didn’t expect for the bike to shoot off
and leave me flat on my back. You want to talk about embarrassing? Let’s
talk about 20 Ugandan villagers rolling in laughter at my slapstick
routine. Anyway that was the end of that; the bike only had a dinged
turn signal and I learned that I don’t know anything about designing
machinery.
That
was my first wakeup call that maybe I hadn’t learned, in college, how
to do anything that was really going to be useful to anyone. Sure I
could impress a clueless villager but I make couldn’t something that
worked, that actually helped that clueless villager. The second wakeup
call came in the shape of a pizza.
After
about a year of eating nothing but rice and beans every meal you’ll do
anything to get a little variety in your diet. For me and my friend,
another pie-in-the-sky academic (of the biology type), that meant
attempting to build a pizza oven. In the back of my mind I still had the
sting of the failed bike-tractor project, but this was an oven, with no
moving parts! There really wasn’t anything that could go wrong this
time (except terrible, horrible, disappointment, as you’ll see). So my
friend and I bought a bag of Portland cement, about 200 locally made
clay bricks, and again, winged it. We thought we were so clever too: we
poured a foundation, slowly built up the support structure (letting the
cement cure before loading), made a dome-like form out of woven reeds
for the oven itself, and then fired it for a thorough cure. Throughout
all this I again learned something valuable about myself: I’m a terrible
stonemason. I got more cement on my overalls than on the bricks. We
also learned that curing at full flame the first time is a recipe for
getting spit on by superheated geysers of cement (you’re supposed to do
several firings, slowly raising the maximum temperature each time), and
that not factoring in expansion rates of the bricks leads to cracking.
Whoops. Oh well. The oven was finished, mostly in one piece. We were so
excited, and proud of course, that we threw a pizza party for all the
volunteers in our region. Picture 30 malnourished volunteers expectedly
awaiting fresh, homemade pizza. Then the disappointment: we didn’t take
into account the thermal conductivity of the local bricks (we couldn’t
get the oven to a high enough temperature) and so instead of
nicely-browned pizza we got something a little bit more done than raw
dough, covered in cheese and tomato sauce. Don’t get me wrong: we, and
they, still ate it, because anything with a heap of cheese on it beats a
bowl of rice hands down, but the point is that again my theoretical
skills had failed me.
It
was probably then, that night while eating the cheesy clump of dough,
that I understood that if I really wanted to help people, like destitute
villagers, or even just some friends in need of a good pizza, that I
needed to augment my skillset, learn how to be “an engine for change,”
learn to be an engineer.
