A 2-way Street
For the past couple of months, a team of high schoolers from the Green School have been working with a local Balinese motorbike mechanic in Ubud. Together, we have been creating a motorbike — from scratch — that will run using a small diesel house generator that will be 100% fueled by biodiesel. This has been a learning experience not only for us, the students, but also for the motorbike mechanic, Pak Nyoman. He has taught us all sorts of mechanic skills such as how to use a welding tool to solder metal parts together; how to drill metal using a heavy duty stationary drill; and how to saw through thick plates of metal using a grinder. These are some of the skills we learned from Pak Nyoman in order to be able to piece together all the parts of our bike.
Although we’ve learned, and are still learning many things from Pak Nyoman, he has had his fair share of learning from us high schoolers as well. The most obvious impact that we’ve had on him has been to introduce him to the ideas of greener methods of transportation. Pak Nyoman is crazy about motorbikes and when he started thinking about how motorbikes might run on cleaner fuel as opposed to regular petrol, he became very excited. He has had a dream for a long time to build a motorbike using diesel fuel — so he is a the kind of guy to think outside the box — so when we shared with him our idea of building a biobike (our biodiesel requires a diesel engine to be able to run) he was immediately interested in our project. Our biobike idea was the perfect joint project for us, the Green School students, and Pak Nyoman. Because he is getting his chance to be able to build a bike not using the standard motorbike fuels, and we are able to build a bike that produces much less (almost no) emissions.
On a more cultural level, something that I have noticed — both from having lived here and in the west, and also being half-Indonesian — is that Indonesian children and young people are recognized by the adults as the next generation but not necessarily as having innovative or progressive ideas. I think our situation is unique because, I believe, although Pak Nyoman is quite open-minded, he is being exposed to the idea that we kids, even though we’re not as knowledgable as he about motorbikes, have new and interesting ideas that are worth him taking the time to invest in and help out with. And it’s not only Pak Nyoman that we interact with. There’s Pak Wayan, the radiator repair expert next door, and all the customers that come in and out of the shop throughout the day. All these local Indonesians see us working on this idea together, that’s so new and unusual to them, and I hope that they also can see that kids can have great, world-changing ideas too. As an example, when Pak Nyoman’s brother visited the shop and heard about our biobike project, he came up with an idea to try and convert his rice field tractor to be able to use biodiesel too!
Even though we still have a ton of work to do before we have a ridable motor bike running on 100% Biodiesel, I think that, in this short time, we have given back something to the local people — that have been helping, working with and watching us on this project — without even knowing it.
