Why build a pedal-powered washing machine?

Part of the tension of running training programs--like bike repair programs--is the question of what we're training for. In other words, when we've finished our class, when we gone over how all the parts of a bike go together and what they do, well, what then?

One obvious answer is vocational partnerships--finding internships, apprenticeships, or whatever else is socially and societally appropriate in bike shops, rickshaw companies, and the like. Another is the negative response: that there is nothing, that class is over, just like the last math class in high school for a soon-to-be English and Latin major. (Ahem.)

And often it stops there--but there are other options.

Especially in places of scarcity (like Nepal), the bike training we're giving needs to be a capacity-building enterprise. This means that it's a means to empowerment, through direct vocational skills--jobs in bike shops; overlapping job skills, like anything related to rickshaws and pushcarts; general mechanical skills; broadly transferable skills, here English-language; as well as a variety of others.

The skills we're teaching don't only have to be used to repair things that other people in other countries have created; they can be used to create things no one has seen or though of before. While the washing machine is not this--they've been built before, in various places--to the kids at the PA Nepal hostel in Sakhu it was and is totally incredible, a total reinvention of the bicycle and the bicycle class I taught there. And so, the point: The point of the washing machine was not to build a washing machine--indeed, it was not to build anything at all, save an imagining of other ideas. Nothing to build, that is, but inspiration.