Eventually, the students built two brick ovens when they went to the Tanzania village of Boza in May to set up the operation and teach the villagers how to use it. Each hydraulic processor can extract the oil from as many as 40 coconuts a day yielding as much as three of liters of oil.

Slade and Ward didn't make the trip, so Bateman took two other students in their place, Benjamin Hillyard and Andrea Tedjamulia.

Every part of the coconut is used. The husk, which has to be cracked open to get at the meat, is burned to heat the oven.

"We showed them how to put it together, and when the first oil started coming out, their eyes widened," Richards said of the villagers who surrounded the press. "They were excited (to see) that much oil come out so quickly."

The students built two prototypes they turned over to the Pope Foundation, along with all their drawings and plans so the foundation could produce more of them, making it possible for villagers to start small businesses extracting the oil, Bateman said. By the end of the year the Pope Foundation could put as many as 100 women to work; in a few years that number could multiply into the thousands.

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E-mail: rodger@desnews.com