Tuesday, August 10, 2004

minor setbacks

i guess i've let myself become a little too confident that things would turn out as planned before we leave. the new solar oven was progressing very smoothly until up to a week go. we submitted the drawings to transtech, the people at the university were conducting multiple experiments with toure's old solar oven, taking temperature measurements necessary to comply with the ASAE solar oven standards. everything kind of stalled last week. apparently this is the time of the year that everyone gets sick in senegal. i guess equivalent to december/january flu season in the US. it's been rotating around my host family, a couple people sick for a few days and when they're better than other are sick. the mold maker at transtech, who's responsible to making our mold was sick all of last week. fortunately he returned to work yesterday, so i'm hoping we'll still get to see a finished box before we leave. i'm not so optimistic about seeing a whole solar oven though. the guy at the university who's running the experiments was also sick most of last week, so there were also setbacks there. but those tests were finished and we have finally (after 3 weeks or so) returned the oven back to madame toure.

this week we plan to begin our test of insulation material. we've collected 13 bags of potential insulators, including chicken feathers, cotton, peanut shells, rice husks, saw dust, foam, newspaper, among other things. we built box yesterday for the test, then found out that each test will take 8 hours to run and it's preferable to run 2 tests for each material. so we will start tomorrow and try to run as many tests as possible before aug 19th. another big concern of ours is if the project will continue after we leave. we have been working with senegalese partners and hope that they will continue to carry on the project until it reaches the production stage. the worst thing that could happen would be for work to stop once we are gone. we hope to find someone at CRESP that can follow up with our partners weekly, to make sure things are still moving along.

our time here's running short. matt (who's been working on a fascinating project about the muslim layen brotherhood here in yoff) is leaving tonight. linda leaves on friday. francis and i leave in a week and a half, at 3am on aug 20th. hopefully we can wrap things up by that time but more importantly i hope that at least some, if not most, of our work we've done this summer will have a lasting impact after we leave.

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