What have we been doing?

Ok so not a single one of my blogs has said anything about what we are doing here, I just pretty much complain and joke about how many nightmarish critters we have and how pooping down a hole can be fun. We actually are doing some serious work here and I’ve got a sore back and some fresh calluses to prove it. I’ll start by giving you a synopsis of our first month, and then I’ll tell you what we think we are going to do for the next eleven.

We started off our time here by attending Grupo Fenix’s Solar Culture Course, which is a 10 day cultural experience mixed with some cool solar energy activities and sustainability awareness. It is intended to be kind of an “eco vacation” for some and for volunteers it serves as an orientation. Grupo runs this course usually 2 times a year, once at the end of July during what the Nicas call “little summer” and again in early January during dry season. “Little summer” is a two week period at the beginning of August during Nica’s dry season when it just doesn’t rain. The weather is beautiful, warm, sunny, and dry for 2 weeks and it comes every year like clock work, up to the point that Grupo Fenix can even plan their course around it. So, the solar culture course was pretty cool. We met some really interesting people from all around the world who attended with us. I could write a whole article about our new acquaintances but for now I’ll just tell you that we had two Australians from Germany who work with the UN, a Uraguayan Italian New Yorker, a Harvard boy from California, a Georgia Tech EE student, and another fellow volunteer, Julio, who Spanish, has a PhD in Physics, is fluent in English and came from Ireland for the course. It was a great group and we had some fun together while we worked. So during the course we did some pretty cool stuff. We started by visiting the for profit solar panel manufacturing company that was founded with the help of Grupo Fenix, called Suni Solar. They are located in Managua walking distance from UNI (Universidad Nacional de Ingenieros). Next we took at 4 hour bus ride to northern Nicaragua where Sabana Grande is located. We spent the rest of our time in Sabana Grande doing the fun stuff. We worked for two days building a solar oven out of wood, roofing tin, glass, and wood shavings as insulation. It’s pretty amazing what these ovens can cook; from plantains to chicken to cakes and cookies, all with only the power of partially sunny day. We also spent a day building adobe bricks for the solar center. The Solar Center is a dream of Grupo Fenix, which is slowly being realized. The solar center is eventually going to be a small campus of buildings and land that will contain a manufacturing facility or solar ovens run completely off of solar energy, a small store where natural remedies, organic foods, and solar products are sold, a small eco hotel, and a community center. Currently the solar center is a large beautiful adobe building that is still in the process of construction. This first building is slated to be a temporary community center and meeting facility and eventually an office for CIPPER (center for research, promotion and production of renewable energy) and manufacturing facility for solar ovens. So we made adobe bricks to help contribute to the construction. Adobe bricks are pretty amazing, they are pretty much just mud and pine needles formed into a brick shape and then dried. There are thousands of buildings in Nica built with this construction, including the house Jenny and I live in. We spent another day building solar battery chargers, where we even got to solder and assemble our own miniature solar panels for the chargers. It actually works, just hook up a few batteries and put the charger in the sun and you can charge up regular alkalines 4-5 times. On our last days we built a solar panel mounting frame, installed it at the solar center along with 4 fluorescent lights, a charge controller, batteries and a 75 watt solar panel to run it all.

Since the solar culture course we have been working on various things every day but staying plenty busy. Like Jenny mentioned in one of her earlier blogs, the mayor of Esteli has ordered 22 solar ovens that he plans to distribute to some select women in his community. This is a big deal for Grupo Fenix because it means paid work for several women for 2 months, it means good publicity for what we are doing, and it means that others are taking to this solar culture. So the women had been working on the ovens for a little over a month before we showed up and for our first 3 weeks after the culture course we have spent the majority of our time doing good ól manual labor constructing the ovens. We just completed the ovens this week. We have also spent one day a week working with the crew at the solar center doing some real manual labor. We are talkin´shovel in hand, sweat on the back under the hot Nicaraguan sun for 8 hours a day. Our first day the foreman pointed out three large mounds of dirt and told us to move them, spread them out and create a nice gradient from the base of the center away so that the heavy rain water would flow away. That was a good days´work! We have also done some sifting, wall preparation for ¨repello¨stucco and lots of fine material sifting for repello mixes. All hard work and is much harder than it looks. After a few days I am really glad that its only once a week so I have time to heal. Of course I am sure they are giving all the hard work to the gringos to see if we will quit or come back next week. So far we are 3 for 3 so take that! Also from speaking with our host family I realized that they have a solar panel and a small 12Vdc pump to run their well water that isn´t working, so I am working on this also. I hope to help get them the right pump and design a system so they can feed a tank on a 8 ft stand and enjoy running water for showers and washing.

Jenny talked about defining her role some so I guess I´ll talk about my offical position too. Last week we had about 2 solid days of meetings with the Grupo Fenix staff and Sabana Grande community leaders. As a result of all the meetings I have found myself working on a couple long term projects. My main assignment is to work with one fo the community leaders, Nimia, on the solar oven research, design and development. This will include cooker design improvements, manufacturing process improvements, and continuing research from some previous work as well as new efforts. Throughout the whole year I will be working closely with community members on projects to help improve their project management and problem solving skills, the whole idea here is sustainable development. I hope that when our year of service is complete and we return to Virginia, we will leave a capable group of leaders rather than a void. I am also working closely with a small group of women to develop policies for a new secondary school scholarship for children of the village that will be funded by a former solar culture course participant. All in all I feel like I am getting to do some interesting stuff and I think what I am working on will make a real difference.