Diesel Irrigation Pump Trial, Foreign Aid Project, 1960s

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Diesel Irrigation Pump Trial, Foreign Aid Project, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Diesel Irrigation Pump Trial, Foreign Aid Project, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-1DA80E

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Somebody flew a diesel pump halfway around the world, and now it is earning its keep, roaring away on a flatbed trailer whilst a dirt canal fills with the kind of muddy water that used to take a dozen men and a water wheel to move. The man in the wide-brimmed hat stands with his hands on his hips in the universal posture of the visiting technical adviser, the one who believes that a machine, properly explained, will make the old ways obsolete by Tuesday.

Around him the local crew watches the hose arc water into the channel with the polite attention of men who have seen engineers come and go before. The pipe does its job well enough, sending a brown plume out over the field, proof that the machine works exactly as advertised in whatever manual it arrived with. Whether it will still be running, or fuelled, or repaired, in five years is a question nobody in the photograph is being paid to answer.

This is what mid-century development aid looked like in the field: a good machine, a confident foreigner, and a channel of water that would keep flowing only as long as someone kept the diesel coming.

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