2041-04-21 Simpler Needs

My overriding question became, ‘How can I improve the lives of my villagers?’

There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions.—Charles Proteus Steinmetz

I remember pacing in my underground laboratory, my footsteps ringing against the fitted stone floors and echoing down the long barrel vaults. The air was cool and dry, kept that way by the constant whisper of fans and throb of distant compressors. Traces of reagents tinged the air, escaped from vent hoods or leaky valves. The soft whine of electric motors, hiss of pneumatics, and thud of solenoids were the only other sounds. My robots and automated devices went about their assigned tasks. I was alone with my thoughts.

I needed to complete my monorail, but the data were telling me something else had to come first.

I was agonizing over the dependency charts for my monorail project. There were so many tasks to accomplish, so many smaller problems that I had to solve before I could even begin a larger task. Even with the best project management tools, visualizing a viable path through all the variables was pushing my cognitive abilities to their limits.

I tapped a wall, calling up a smart display. I traced a finger over the master chart, zoomed in to a detail, and inserted a new dependency and the associated notes. I stepped back, watched as the new changes rippled through the master chart, and tried not to despair. There were too many places my plans could fail, and no clear path to success. Not yet.

The single largest challenge to my planning was, ‘How do I incorporate ethical decision-making into the engineering?’

I had a plan before I came to the Central African Republic. Of course, no plan survives contact with reality, but even my decades of experience and deeply ingrained pessimism did not prepare me for seeing my villagers’ lives. There were so many apparently trivial details that made enormous differences in their quality of life. How could I choose to spend my resources on an intriguing (to me) engineering challenge when people living just over my head were suffering?

It wasn’t that I had the luxury of indulging my ethics. Even if I were a cold-hearted villain, pragmatic necessity dictated that I act to improve the situation. I chose this place for my lab specifically to keep myself safe and my work secret for the decade or more that my next project required. If the villagers remained impoverished, if the locality descended further into chaos, it was only a matter of time until desperate villagers betrayed me to the bounty hunters or tried to loot my lab. A mob with torches was not out of the question.

My overriding question transformed from, ‘How can I complete the monorail?’ to, ‘How can I improve the lives of my villagers?’

The problem set included everything I had learned or observed about my region of the CAR. The transportation infrastructure was almost nonexistent, there was effectively no trade with the outside world, almost no communication, little education, minimal healthcare, and even less literacy. The central government was an active hindrance and was riddled with corruption. Local communities had only themselves to rely on, and even those resources could be divided at a moment’s notice by infighting based on language, culture, religion, or personal animosities.

The incident that crystallized the problem for me was an everyday occurrence in that part of the world. Omba, my most reliable go-between, had been staying in her new residence at the monorail more often. She was usually babysitting for one or more of her nieces’ youngest children. On this particular day, she was looking after Ahuda, a little girl who appeared to be about three years old. I was communicating with Omba through the monorail’s expert system, LEGBA, as I often did; LEGBA translated my English into Omba’s dialect of Sango, and vice versa.

I do not recall the particulars of that conversation, but I vividly recall the interruption. Ahuda was playing happily, exploring Omba’s garden. Suddenly she cried out and stumbled back toward Omba. The child had apparently stepped on a sharp rock and had a freely bleeding cut in the sole of her foot.

Omba spoke soothingly to the little girl, but I was worried. So many children here died of opportunistic infections. The soil in this jungle was rife with parasites, bacteria, and viruses, and I was a long way from having a properly equipped dispensary for the village. Morally, I cared for Ahuda’s life. Pragmatically, a loss in Omba’s family could threaten the early adoption of my entire project. Omba was my key contact into the local culture, an irreplaceable advocate and translator. If Omba had reason to resent or distrust LEGBA, my project was doomed. Then I remembered something I had learned during my time in Micronesia.

I keyed LEGBA, then asked, tentatively, “Banana plant root?”

Omba gestured, as though to say, Yes, yes, and said that she knew of this thing. She settled the child, then stepped out in her garden to find a young banana plant.

I had been happy to learn that a number of banana varieties had found their way into CAR from their historical ranges to the west in Cameroon. Aside from food, many of the subspecies were useful for a number of other purposes.

Omba selected a young plant, then uprooted it and brought it back to the house. She stripped off the larger leaves and set them to one side. Brushing the dirt off the tip of the root, she stripped off the outer layers, leaving the core of the root exposed, translucent and colorless.

Placing the root tip on one of the leaves she had set aside, Omba used the butt of her machete to pound the root tip into a paste. Once she had the paste, Omba coaxed Ahuda to lift up her injured foot. Omba packed the paste into the wound. The girl squirmed and protested at first, but settled down almost immediately. Omba wrapped the leaves into a bandage and tied them off neatly.

This mirrored one of my experiences in Micronesia thirty-odd years earlier. I was helping a colleague lay out the pipeline for a microhydropower installation on his family’s land. We were surveying the route up a volcanic hillside covered in jungle. At one point, I slipped on a wet rock and gashed my leg open on a sharp spur of basalt. I was sure I was going to come down with a nasty collection of jungle infections. My colleague, a local, told me he would take care of it. He performed essentially the same actions as I had just seen Omba do. Not only did it stop hurting almost immediately, but within a week I could not even detect the injury. There was no pain, no infection, and no scar. I could not think of a manufactured wound treatment that would have worked as well.

That incident, along with similar experiences with other local healers, has continued to inform my attitudes about local or traditional medicine. My experience in the field has taught me to stay open to, and to inquire about, local remedies for common local problems.

Although Omba’s great-niece recovered quickly, the larger problem remained that none of my villagers had shoes. CAR residents living closer to the paved roads and in the larger towns did have access to imported sandals, but in the more rural areas, almost everyone went barefoot out of necessity. Handmade sandals from local materials were generally more trouble than they were worth and fell apart or were eaten by vermin in less time than they required to make.

I knew from my research that several of the more virulent and widespread diseases in the region were spread by bare foot to ground contact. I also knew, from uncomfortable personal experience, that barefoot travel is exhausting. When you have to spend much of your day simply walking from home to source to home again, it is difficult to summon the energy to do anything else.

If I could provide my villagers with shoes that would protect them from common injuries and diseases, and that would make the necessary walking more comfortable and less exhausting, I would be addressing one of their most basic needs and would be materially improving their quality of life.

Now that I had framed the problem properly, it was clear that the most ethical or moral thing to do was to get shoes for everyone, as soon as possible. I was annoyed with myself for not thinking of it earlier.

I was, of course, not the first person to identify this problem. I am a firm believer in not reinventing the wheel.

Roughly three decades before my work began in the CAR, a company bought the rights to a proprietary resin that could be molded into a resilient closed-cell foam that made durable, cheap, versatile shoes. The foam molded to the wearer’s feet, yet was resilient enough to endure the repeated compression cycles of walking. The company developed a number of patented designs, including features for water shedding and for ventilation. If I recall correctly, they sold hundreds of millions of pairs of shoes, and their products were widely copied.

The shoes stuck in my memory particularly because the company at one time had a charitable division that donated shoes to several African countries. I investigated and learned that they still existed, and still had a distributor in South Africa.

From that point, it was mostly a matter of persistence to buy enough shoes to equip every person in LEGBA’s biometric database. This was a good example of the old proverb, “If the problem can be solved by money, it’s not a problem, it’s the costs.” The costs, in this case, were much lower than those of creating a new solution, and I had the funds available.

The next problem was to avoid the pitfalls of conventional delivery within CAR of delays, loss, theft, and bribes and shakedowns both official and unofficial. If I had chosen conventional delivery methods, I doubt that even one pair of shoes would have reached any of my villagers. Instead, I called in a favor and arranged for delivery of the shoes to the nearest ship in my old recycling fleet. From there, I had the shoes packed into a large net bag and rigged to one of the fleet’s lighter-than-air robot aircraft. The LTA deposited the bag of shoes atop the monorail’s canopy, directly over Omba’s residence. My spider robots rigged one end of the shoe bag to a monorail strut, with the free end dangling just below the roof eave of Omba’s house.

Once again, if Omba had not approved, the project would have died then and there. Fortunately, she saw the advantages of the new footwear immediately and exclaimed over her own green-brown pair and those of her young great-nieces. Ahuda in particular loved her bright red shoes from the start, and upon discovering their protection and comfort, became even more rambunctious in her explorations. One or two of Omba’s nieces took a little convincing at first, but she was persuasive. The shoes really were comfortable, but I think they were the first shoes some of the villagers had ever tried on. I can’t blame them for being cautious about a new experience.

Omba distributed the shoes to her family and other villagers with LEGBA’s help. At first, the shoes went to those who came to the monorail pylon to visit Omba or to get water from the pylon’s deep-well tap. Once they returned to the village wearing new shoes, there was a constant parade of villagers coming to collect their own shoes. It was not long before all the shoes had been distributed.

I had come up with a temporary solution to the incident that had defined the problem. For the immediate future, all my villagers owned shoes that would prevent small but dangerous foot injuries, reduce the chances of contracting a number of diseases, and reduce tiredness from walking barefoot. My solution materially improved their quality of life, without inflicting any significant costs on them.

I felt some satisfaction, but I was not under any illusion that I had solved the problem permanently. I had simply been able to buy myself a year or so, and only by virtue of access to and knowledge of the global market. I needed to apply my scientific and engineering abilities to a better solution. If I did nothing more, I would have actually made the situation worse. Before, no one had shoes, and the attendant misery was simply accepted. Now that the villagers had experienced comfortable, sturdy footwear, they had come to expect and rely on the new shoes. Without a ready supply of replacement shoes, any loss would become a source of complaint and conflict.

Shoes would be an ongoing need. Shoes wear out, children grow, and, if my other projects were successful, more people would move to the region. Unfortunately, external trade for shoes was not yet feasible for this population. They needed a system of local production for local needs, with an option to grow a marketable excess.

I went through the data on the resins and other materials my reactors had been able to extract from the local environment and compared them with the resin used to produce the shoes. Unfortunately, the results were not optimal. Of course, that would have been too easy.

I looked through the literature and consulted with a number of agronomists online, looking for regionally suitable species to produce better resins. I made arrangements to import a starter planting of the most promising cultivars. Once they arrived, I had my robots plant them along the monorail right of way. There, I could monitor and protect them, and could introduce them to the villagers as a useful crop. Again, having Omba learn about the new plants first, and then advocate for them to the other villagers, was invaluable to the project’s eventual success.

While that long-term project was in progress, I designed a simple set of machines to turn jungle resins into shoes, and which could be operated by locals. My plan was to train shoemakers and to keep them subsidized and organized until they were self-supporting.

By the time that first purchased lot of shoes began to wear out, my local production system was up and running.

I could not afford any more time away from building the monorail, so I added shoemaking oversight as a subroutine to LEGBA. LEGBA knew everyone and would identify each newcomer. Now the system would also identify anyone not wearing shoes. That would generate an order to the nearest shoemaker and trigger production and delivery of the requisite amount of resin. When the shoes were produced, the shoemaker would receive a phone micropayment, and LEGBA would arrange delivery to the customer.

Word of mouth had spread beyond my sponsored villages, probably as quickly as a walking villager. The foam shoes became the standard footwear in the region, and my shoemakers were never idle for long. I was pleased to learn recently that most of my original shoemaking systems are still in use. Most CAR residents now have access to a variety of shoes, but the original models have become something of a regional identifier and a source of pride. I truly did not expect that.

I kept a pair for myself, of course. In my later years on that project, I would occasionally step out on the monorail canopy, usually at night. The soft cushioning and nonmarking soles were ideal for standing on the smooth surface of the solar glazing. Looking up at the stars from among the jungle treetops, breathing in the humid richness of scents, and listening to the varied calls of animals, birds, and insects was an appreciated anodyne to the sterile echoes of my laboratory.

I now believe it was my pride that originally got in my way and caused so much stress and frustration. My engineering obsession with complex transportation systems blindered me to the villagers’ simpler need for shoes.

I have since tried to balance the hubris inherent to a position of wider knowledge against the humility required to accurately observe and evaluate the needs of others.

Even with the CAR monorail in full operation, the last kilometer of travel is almost always on foot. The monorail is only one part of the total transportation system, whether that system is used to visit the neighbor next door or to take the orbital launcher to one of the space habitats.