Dear Family, friends, and supporters,
Welcome to my first African letter of 2016.
It was a very busy summer preparing for this year’s trip which will include a bevy of projects at Imani VTC and on Ukerewe Island. The Ukerewe project has really come along under the sponsorship of my Rotary club (Kingston-Frontenac) and the dialogue with our partner on the ground, Bartolomeo Misana. I will be doing some administrative work on this project while in the Kilimanjaro district, and I am looking forward to my two week visit to the Island at the end of October. I will leave further discussion of this project until we get closer to our visit.
As in previous years, I want to introduce this year’s work by introducing our great team of students from the Université de Sherbrooke. This year we had four candidates apply for the two positions, and Sista Adella has called in some divine assistance to create two more places for our students to stay. As a result we were able to offer an internship to all four applicants.
Sophie and Amandine will be focusing on composting and agricultural projects including conventional composting, Black Soldier Fly composting, and Moringa tree development. Joé and Olivier are going to pick up the Rocket stove project initiated last year and test three different sizes of these high efficiency stoves. They are also going to experiment using dried maize stalks as a fuel source as these are currently burned as waste.
In the first two weeks the students have quickly adjusted to the rhythm at the school although the last week gave them a bit of an early morning noise reprieve as the students were away for a week’s holidays. Joe has become the Conventional Compost Master starting 7 new compost piles in one week. He has been assisted by the others, but he has been the driving force in this initiative. Amandine has developed her own following of students who are eager to learn French, so we will soon have tri-lingual education at Imani VTC. Olivier is demonstrating excellent technical skills and has tested and restored many of the donated products received from Lee Valley giving them a second lease on life. The crank operated LED lights look to be particularly popular with the Sisters in this land of irregular power. Sophie has been fighting a cold (NOT Malaria or anything really serious), and is slowly getting over it. Her management and accounting skills are coming through as the team accountant and chief organizer. She had her PDI document (the first mandatory work term submission for the University) completed seemingly before it was out. If she can transfer some of these management skills to the rest of us we will be well served.
The Sisters have dug a new shallow well to expand the irrigation opportunities at Imani so I suspect that all of the students will also be involved in the expansion of the drip irrigation system installed in 2014 by the student’s predecessors. This is the ideal prototype site for our solar-powered rope pump, so it is time to move this project up the priority list. The challenge is simple: Create a robust, solar powered pump, to serve hand-dug wells, capable of pumping 2000 litres per hour at 20 m of head, and costing less than 1000 USD. The pump should be able to be manufactured and serviced locally.
To those of you who understand the above, please help me out. Realization of the above could save as many lives in Africa as anything else we do here.
Last week when we cycled into Moshi, Olivier was not able to join us as his bike had 3 broken spokes and an un-rideable wow in the rear wheel. It was definitely a job for the local Fundi wa Baicikale. The alternate mode of transport was the recently introduced 3 wheeled Bajaji. The driver (who spoke no English) was not quite sure how to deal with the 6’-2” mzungu with the extra large bicycle, but for 10,000 shillings he would have taken him back to Montreal. Olivier arrived in one piece at my friend’s office, who called the local fundi (who again spoke no English) and he and Olivier trotted off to the shop carrying the broken bicycle. 1 hour and another 10,000 shillings later the bicycle wheel was repaired and running truer than when it left the factory 25 years ago.
The sequel to the story is that as Olivier was flying around the Coca-Cola round-about on his way back to our B&B his left pedal flew off into the middle of the traffic. He took one look at the chaos of cars, trucks, motor bikes, and bajajis, and decided the pedal was not worth the risk to life and limb. Two hundred meters beyond the round-about, as he was pushing his bike up the hill, a young local cyclist stops and hands him his pedal. Very Cool.
That’s all for now. We are off to another great year of opportunities and new friends. Karibuni sana (Welcome to all), we would love to see you in Tanzania.
Peter