Giving an update

To be honest not much happened this past week, but the powers that be demanded an update, so here it is:

For the majority of this week, we had nothing to do. We were waiting for money to arrive from the E.U. for a project that they are sponsoring and it took much longer to get here than it should have. So finally it arrived Thursday and we were able to do some work Friday. All that we did then was cut rebar with a hack saw (this is possibly the worst method of cutting rebar as we went through several blades) and while this was boring, it is the necessary first step in the project.

The project itself is a mass of 42 installations of seven 120 watt panels each. Each of the seven panel units will power several houses, so they will not be placed on roofs, but on 5 meter tall towers for the sake of centralization and security. This is where the rebar comes in, as it is the foundation to pour the concrete base around for the tower. This requirement of the tower complicates the process as most of these are destined for the east coast, which is hard to reach, and the weight of the concrete bases will mandate the use of a semi truck to transport them. Once you near the east coast, the roads are usually unaccessible during the rainy season, so we will have to float the components on a river boat to get them near the installation site. These systems once complete should provide a good bit of power the places that have no chance of being incorporated into the power grid anytime in the foreseeable future.

Some other observations:

The Suni Solar building is semi open to the outside, and they have two trees growing in the middle of the building. We found leaf cutter ants crawling all over one of them which were quite interesting. Watching the work we saw that they never cut more the 2/5 of any leaf, as if they knew not to kill the plant. (You can see a semi blurry picture of one above.)

People are accoustomed to using non-ripe fruit. We have been to a few farmers markets and much of the food is not yet ripe since it's not quite the right season for many of them, but most of the cooking we've had useing this fruit as been good. For example, we've had a lot of lemonade made with small, green lemons. It was good because the compensated and added more sugar, making it taste normal.

Later on either today or tomorrow we are looking at going to one of the craft markets in the city; if we end up doing that I'll write another update about it.

Until next time,
- Jim