Today, we checked out the power line running to the "Swamp Well Pump". The maintenance people here at Kamakwie felt that the wiring running down the hill was faulted. We checked it out and verified that it is OK. But when we hooked up the pump to it, the motor got instantly hot and we removed it. We found out that they had rewound one of the pumps and this was not the one that was rewound. After lunch we went back down and installed the refurbished motor, but this still did not function to our satisfaction. We will make one more attempt on it tomorrow, hoping that we can determine if it is the wiring or the motor itself.
We also spent time today doing more current measurements, and then sketched a drawing of the hospital compound that we can make notes on. Tomorrow we want to walk around the compound again to verify our notes and then we can begin to assess what the demand for electricity will be here for the future. We will base our proposal for upgrading the power on these notes and examinations of the present infrastructure.
We have been eating our meals each day at Drs. Tom and Karen Asher's house. We are very appreciative of the hospitality they have shown us and we are very happy to have come to know them in their ministry here at Kamakwie. We are looking forward to coming back here to build them an electrical system that will meet their needs. This will likely include a significant solar installation along with interfacing to existing and possibly a new generator.
The guest house we are staying in has electrical service to it when the generators run, so we attempt to charge our computer batteries when we have power. At night there is very little air blowing and it is very hot and sticky sleeping. It seems like it rarely gets below 90 degrees even during the night. During the day it has been hovering around 100 degrees with a very high percentage of humidity. It has not rained once since we have been in Africa, except for a shower of about one minute duration. We are told that this is a high malaria risk area, but we have seen almost no mosquitoes since we arrived. Two interns, Laura and Emily, have been staying in the same guest house we are in, and they have taken their meals with us as well. Ryan is also a single guy who is living with the Asher's and we have enjoyed getting to know him as well. The six of us were going to play a game of Settlers of Catan this evening, but they got called away to the hospital for an emergency snake-bite case. We do not venture off any trails here at night and it is not safe for us to go anywhere outside without a good flashlight. We were at the well site today and some local children were playing and working at a garden area when they spied a small snake, most likely a Black Mamba. We did not see the snake, but were there when these boys saw it slithering away. They got very excited when they saw it...
On Sunday we will leave Kamakwie and head back to Makeni. We will be picked up there and taken to the town of Panguma to look at what is needed there to supply power to a hospital, a school, a church and a chief's home. The town has been without electricity for 17 years, having the infrastructure destroyed by the rebels during civil war in the country. Tom was here before to look at the need, and Gene and Gary will get to see it for their first time. This project will consist of installing high voltage power lines. The local electric utility has approved for ITEC to come and do this job, so when funding is provided for it, this will be a future work team project. After spending one day there we will head back to Freetown, where we will spend another night at the new Companero Hotel. On Tuesday we will board the water taxi to the airport and then begin our flights home from Freetown to Accra, to Amsterdam, to Detroit, and finally Harrisburg.
As it is not possible for high speed Internet here, the blog updates are almost exclusively text. We will be totally out of communication from the time we leave here on Sunday morning, until we arrive in Amsterdam on Tuesday, but we will send out SPOT messages along the way, and if you have been checking them before you should be able to follow us on our travels, even though you will not likely be able to hear anything from us in person by email or calls. We have been able to use Tom's satellite telephone to call our loved ones at home periodically, and this has been a real blessing. We have not been able to use the Magic Jack since we left Ouagadougou, so the "free" calls have been nonexistent. What a blessing it was to use that, though, when we did have high speed Internet. It was just like picking up the phone and calling across the street.
The channels of communication available to us all today are very amazing.
Do continue to hold us up in your thoughts and prayers. It has been a good three weeks and we have a lot of information to digest as we begin to assemble proposals for these five projects that we have assessed during our time in Africa. Tom & Linda and another couple will head back to Africa within two weeks of our arrival at home, so they need to get some rest.
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