While the world watches refugees from Central America come to the U.S. seeking asylum, a Columbia Falls man says a non-partisan and simple approach to the problem could help empower them in their homeland.

About four years ago, Dave Renfrow started bicycling in Mexico and Central America. While in Guatemala, he learned of a non-governmental organization called Maya Pedal based in San Andrés, Itzapa which takes old bicycles and makes them into machines that do everything from laundry to shell corn off the cob.

Renfrow became involved with the organization and last year headed up a local effort to send more some 400 used bicycles to the region. Maya Pedal fixes up the bikes, makes them into machines and then, for a small fee, the people buy them.

Electricity in rural areas of a country like Guatemala is sparse at best, non-existent at worst. The machines help make it possible for a family to make a living, Renfrow noted in an interview last week.

Renfrow said that while violence is playing a role in the migration, he said the main source is a shift in agriculture. The U.S. has some of the best farmers in the world. As such, U.S. grain like corn has flooded the market. Farmers in Guatemala, in turn, have a hard time making a living on the corn they used to produce.

Climate change is also a problem. Central America has a wet and dry season, but increasingly, the wet season comes in a deluge in a few weeks, with floods, while the dry season is increasingly droughty.

That impacts native crops as well.

As life gets worse, people want to leave.

“We need to go to the source of the problem,” Renfrow argued.

Maya Pedal is one way to address rural poverty and it’s a relatively easy way to help. The U.S. and other countries should invest in the people. It’s much easier, and far less political than arresting them at the border, he noted.

“These bicycles create microbusinesses and it’s working,” Renfrow noted.

He noted one machine that they recently built that extracts the jute fibers from the agave plant. The fibers are used to make things like rugs and the juice is used to make sweet syrups as well as tequila.

The machine takes a job that used to take five hours and boils it down to an hour.

“Our machines create opportunity,” said Maya Pedal President Veronica Bush.

Renfrow has intimate knowledge of the landscape. Some winters he’s traveled as much as 4,000 miles by bicycle through the region. Last winter, at the age of 66, he biked about 1,600 miles.

Renfrow notes that many of these countries are beautiful and could be tourists destinations. He said that while the barrios of Guatemala City are, indeed, dangerous and young women in particular are subject to violence, the countryside of Guatemala and its small towns are a welcoming place.

Learn more about Maya Pedal at http://www.mayapedal.org