Power Adventures

So I keep putting off getting a picture of the power setup on here, but I promise I'll do so soon. But since I've got a free moment I figured I'd describe the power setup I've currently got going.

City power to our house is sporadic, but not bad. We've not really logged it, but I'd say we have power somewhere between 75-85% of any given day, on average. I don't think there has ever been a day with 100% power, but on the flip side there hasn't been 24 hours without power either. The most common event is 1-2 hour segments where power goes off, and then when it comes on it will flicker on to being steady over 30 minutes or so. In contrast our water situation is much worse, we probably are without water ~50-60% of the time.

At any rate our solution to the water problem has been to get a 100 liter trash can and keep it filled. Water tends to pop on around 5am, so it is just a matter of getting up and blearily sticking more water in the trash can.

The power solution is a bit more complex. We’re both geeks, and we both do a bunch of computer work at home (both for fun and for our jobs). So we didn’t want any down time if we could help it. The solution is currently at 4 x 100 AH car batteries, 3 inverters (2 x 500 W / 8 A charging, 1 x 300 W), 4 voltage regulators (1 x 1000 W, 3 x 600 W), and more plug adapters, extension cords, and other such nonsense than I really want to think about. Sure, we could wire it all into the wall circuits, but really we only care about 3 things: computers, fans, and lights. So we’ve got the above components wired up into 3 separate circuits, 1 for computers and lights, 1 for fans. The computer / lights circuit takes a lot more juice, so we have 3 x 100 AH batteries in parallel on that. The fan circuit gets the left over 100 AH battery. There is a separate “UPS” circuit that also goes off the 3 x 100 AH batteries, making use of that 300 W inverter. It always draws through the batteries, so there is no downtime. In contrast, the charging inverters switch to city power direct when it becomes available, and that switch takes about 1 second to complete – really bad if you are in the middle of a read/write. The result is, hypothetically, a system that will keep all of our computer / lights running for 6-8 hours without power and the fans for up to 12 hours. So as long as we get enough power to keep the batteries charging more than we’re drawing it is fine. The batteries will likely need to be replaced in about 6 months because we abuse them, but they’re the cheapest part of the system, which all told cost ~$500, and provides power cheaper than a generator does, and without all the noise (if people are interested I can get the figures, we drew charts and stuff in excel, but I don’t have them on me right now). A number of friends here are interested enough in it that they’re looking at replicating the system for their own houses.

Wolof Dictionary

A friend of mine here is in the process of writing this - a Wolof <-> English dictionary / translator. Wolof being the language that I'm attempting to learn. He's doing it in Ruby which as of late has been my programming language of choice to learn more about. I especially am liking it on Rails. This weekend we might have a multi-player gaming party - yep, a geek is a geek is a geek.

Basse and Beyond

So it becomes more and more difficult to communicate experiences here back home and feel like it might have a chance of coming through accurately. But I suppose that is what needs to be tried. Over the past couple of weeks I have visited remote schools here that don’t have a source of clean water (let alone a tap) or a pit latrine (let alone working toilets). Many receive food via the world food program, and when the children are blessed with a good headmaster they actually do get a large portion of the food. A minor offence within the program is the teachers partaking in the food as well – at one point I realized I was eating food program supplies for lunch with some teachers, the program supplies beans that taste much better than can normally be found. But you can’t really blame teachers for eating some over lunch, in fact anything else would be a breach of Gambian custom and seen to be a disrespect – hence my eating at least a token amount. Unfortunately the less scrupulous headmasters sell the food, the beans fetch a great price on the open market. In many markets you can find the beans for sale, something the WFP volunteers are always disheartened to learn, if they do, since most only stay on for 3 months or so. Potentially the data collection that I took part in will help show which schools are selling the beans, because of inflated registration numbers, but it is difficult for anything to be done about it. There is an acute labor shortage here in education, teachers are desperately needed, but the pay isn’t sufficient to get people to go up-country and live without water or electricity in a mud-hut. Most people who are educated want to escape that life, not return to it. So the bad must be taken with the good, for the time being.

Life and death here take on a bit of a different tone. In the 6 months that I’ve been here I’ve known three people who have had major losses and told me about it. My host sister while in training was pregnant, but the child miscarried – she was far enough along that in the United States the child would have likely survived. Right up until then she was working in the fields, showing me how to use the hand hoe. When I returned from an exercise I learned that she was with her parents recovering after being at the hospital (a word used here for any medical facility) after the miscarriage. Mostly I found out because my host brother (her husband) wanted to make sure it was okay if she had the deck of cards which I had left for them while I was gone. Two of my co-workers have lost family, one a wife, another a child. Both times they moved on after a day or two. Death is too common here to dwell very long over it. That or maybe you just dwell on it all the time, and so it becomes more normal, less startling. Only two steps removed I know one of the men who died last month attempting to cross between Morocco and Spain the day that about 12 were killed so attempting.

Rambling a bit. So the main point of my trip, to collect information from schools, was a success. With the process over I feel like I've got a much better idea of what is out there. What might be done to improve information flow in the education system, and thereby maybe fix some of those schools with bad water and not even a pit latrine. It isn't that money and the will to fix the problem isn't there so much as the information is hard to come by. It is a 14 hour ride, easily, from Basse to the government here in Banjul. Communication inbetween is hard and you can't look someone up in a phone book and call to let them know that you don't have this or that. Either you are able to pass it up the network, in which case it is likely to be forgotten, or you can come in to Banjul and try to find the person who can fix the problem. But there are tons of people like you out there and very little information for the person who can fix things to go on that isn't highly biased. So how do you know where to assign the resources? So even if you are well meaning, you still don't know what to do, but good information could solve that. But right now the system creates no reports on school conditions, even though we collect that information. The more I look at the problems the more I see information flow as an area that if improved could help a lot - it isn't that it will solve everything, but it is a change people are willing to embrace and that could have an impact. Already we started sending out teams to fix school fences based on the information we gathered and a quick report generation. That felt good - so right now at least I'm on a bit of a high.