Wherever it is deployed, there is no guarantee, however, that appropriate technology will in fact be appropriate. After some visiting engineers observed how labor-intensive and slow it was for the women logic of a Guatemalan village to shell corn by hand, they designed a simple mechanical device to do the job more quickly. The new device certainly saved time. cher, but after a few weeks the women returned to the wars old manual method. Why? Because they valued what the time that hand-shelling gave them to chat and exchange news.