Source: Aljazeera

Patacamaya, Bolivia –  Seventeen-year-old Esteban Quispe is busy at his computer. Seated in the room his parents have turned into a workshop, Quispe is surrounded by different materials – electrical wires, metal sheets, and bulbs of different sizes and colours – all of which he has collected from a local rubbish dump to make into robots.

Quispe’s creations are made from electronic waste and the teenager is entirely self-taught.

He proudly shows off a toy car with a circuit of bulbs that light from left to right like the KITT car from the 1980s American TV series Knight Rider; an LED cube which displays 3D images; and his most complex and beloved creation – a square-shaped robot that is a replica of, and is named after, the Pixar character Wall-E.

Quispe stands in the courtyard of his home with his mother Teresa and his father Martin [Valentino Bellini/Al Jazeera]

Quispe’s hometown, Patacamaya, with a population of about 12,000, lies about 100km southeast of the Bolivian capital La Paz.

Bolivia remains the poorest country in South America, with low levels of scientific and technological innovation. In Patacamaya, where many residents live in poverty and don’t have access to secondary education, Quispe’s talent for making electronic devices from e-waste has made him something of a local celebrity.

The teenager’s knack for building electronic devices caught the attention of local media last year after he won first prize in a high school robotics competition with his robot Wall-E.

He first came up with the idea of making it in 2008 after watching the Pixar film. Quispe began collecting materials to piece together the robot. After several attempts, he completed the final version in 2014.

“I immediately liked the character because of its intelligence and ecological conscience,” Quispe explains.

“I am a bit like Wall-E,” says the teenager, “as I wish Bolivia was a less polluted country.”

Quispe describes one of the reasons why he focused on electronic waste. “I know electronic waste should be discarded separately from other kinds of waste because it’s more dangerous, but here in Patacamaya people still don’t understand the importance of differentiating,” he says.

A childhood photograph of Quipse selling some his first creations made from copper wires [Valentino Bellini/Al Jazeera]

Quispe became interested in mechanics when he was a child – he used to watch his father, a former construction worker, make wooden toy cars in his spare time. Together, when Quispe was 10, they built a toy vehicle with a set of lights. Quispe began practising on his own, making small objects from copper wires, moving on to increasingly complex designs, and soon outdoing his father’s models.

When he was 11, he started selling his first creations on the street. He would set them up on a table and sit on the pavement with his younger brother Hernan and other children from the neighbourhood and wait for people to stop by.