A few years ago I was inspired by a company that designed a machine that compressed a mixture of soil and cement to form blocks stable enough to build houses with using only the strength of four men. No water, no firing (i.e. no wood burned), and a fraction of cement otherwise used to make concrete blocks.  The one I read about was developed by a company called KickStart.  They call their design the Money Maker Block Press, but they have developed many other technologies to serve the poor to help them make enough income to get above the poverty line: water pumps geared towards farmers with small amounts of land, oil presses, and they have more products in development.

What I'd like to see is a block press machine that can be operated by a few women, who probably have children or grandchildren hanging off of them all at the same time.  I saw women working at building sites in rural Bangladesh, even though every one told me, building is not considered "women's work."  They carried water to the site and baskets of broken bricks, nothing "heavy" enough to be considered man's work.  And I'm sure not paid half as well either.  But what if women were given the chance to participate in higher paying jobs?  Would it steal work from able bodied men?  Would it create too much of a burden on women who are still responsible for taking care of the home and feeding the family?

I met a family that was able to move out of the slums of Dinajpur by working together with another family to grind wheat and make roti's to sell at the market.  Within ten years they had a block house with a nice roof that wasn't going to be taken away anytime soon.  The father bought the wheat at the market.  The grandmother and mother took turns grinding the wheat with a foot pedal, which they then prepared the roti's from, which in turn were sold by the men of the family.  This stays within the cultural norms, men working outside the house, women staying within the parameters of their housing compound.  But what happens when one doesn't have a the luxury of a normal family unit?  How do you then fit into society's norms and rules?

My grandmother was part of a normal family, with a house, a husband and at the time, 5 children.  But then my grandfather left (hence the 6 year gap between my father and his older brother) for some reason, and my grandmother had to somehow feed her family on her own.  So she made candle wicks out of cotton that could be sold at the market.  But being a Brahmin, she couldn't sell anything at the market, so she had to go through a middleman which she lost half her profit to.  I can understand society wanting to 'protect' women from the bad parts of society (or is that just my mom's voice I am hearing in my head?).  But to be thrust into poverty because you don't fit the mold.  That I don't get.