An Unwelcome Experience

It's over eleven years since I first packed a rucksack and headed off into the unknown (Delhi, back in 1999) to see the world and satisfy my thirst for knowledge, adventure and experience(s). Since then I've spent nearly as much time on the road as at home and seen things I never dreamt I'd see. Now, for many reasons, I feel as if my years on the road might be coming to something of an end, or at the least, a big change. I'm getting older, I'm about to spend a fortune on reeducating myself, and quite honestly there aren't many places I haven't been to (although a Central Asia/India trip would still be tempting!). But above all, I've just found myself growing tired of the whole bus/hotel/transient friendship thing. The old adrenaline rush of arriving in a strange town in an unfamiliar country is more often than not replaced by a sense of foreboding about the inevitable hassles from touts and taxi drivers. And I've had enough dinners on my own and early nights in shitty hotel rooms to last me a lifetime.

But I will always need a bit of adventure in my life, so I chose to combine adventure with work experience and come to Nicaragua for half a year. And it's also the reason why I hope to make energy in the Developing World one of the areas I study in depth when I head to Stanford in September. And also the reason why I needed to make one small trip to the Pacific side of Nicaragua and Costa Rica before heading home to the UK in two weeks.

After a couple of days' diving in Costa Rica, where I saw manta rays and bull sharks, and a few great days on the island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua, the above thoughts were weighing heavily on my mind and I decided to head back to Bluefields a couple of days earlier than I'd planned. So on Thursday I headed to the town of Granada for the night, from where I would move on to Managua the following day and start the overnight trip back to Bluefields. I was travelling with a guy called Spencer who I'd met on Ometepe. While we went for lunch, Spencer asked me if I'd ever had anything stolen in all my years of traveling. I stopped to think. "Some sunglasses once, took them right off my face". Spencer remarked that if I'd had to stop and think, that must be a good sign. After lunch, Spencer headed off to buy a bus ticket and I decided to follow Avenida La Calzada from the centre down to the shores of Lake Nicaragua for a look-see.

At its top end, Avenida La Calzada is a tree-lined pedestrianised avenue full of bars and outdoor cafes. Heading down away from the centre towards the lake though, it gradually gets more and more deserted until down by the lake front there are very few people. There is a crumbling old pier jutting out into the lake and a concrete promenade that heads off along the lake in front of a narrow park. I stopped at the beginning of the promenade and gazed out at the lake and the hills on the far side and pondered why the Spanish city planners back in the 16th century had chosen to site the city so far away from the lake shore rather than make it the focus of the city*

Anyway, after contemplating that and other important questions of life for a few minutes, a car pulled up on the street and a family of Nicaraguans got out: father, mother, late teenage daughter and a son who was clearly severely mentally handicapped. They came across the plaza towards me and spent a minute or two gazing at the lake, then I watched as the father (who seemed quite old to have children still in their teens) took some photos of his family on the daughter's mobile phone. As I watched, it struck me how hard life must be for this family, who although apparently much wealthier than the average Nicaraguan family judging by the car and nice mobile phone, had to cope with their son's disability in a country really not equipped to deal with such problems. What a random stroke of good luck I had to be born not only strong and healthy, but in the country I was! How unfair that some people should have all the cards stacked against them! I offered to take a picture of the whole family together, which they were grateful for, then they headed back to their car.

No sooner had they got in the car and driven away, than a young man, mid-twenties probably and dressed all in beige, walked up alongside me and said hello. "Here we go again," I instinctively thought, "what's he after?" "Buenos dias", he said. I mumbled an answer and did my best to seem uninterested, hoping he would just move on. "Are you a tourist?" he continued. "How long you been in Nicaragua?" He was talking in a mixture of Spanish and English which seemed to telepathically anticipate the gaps in my Spanish. I decided it was simpler to just tell him I was a tourist and had been in the country for a week, rather than go into details of my job in Bluefields. I was hoping he'd get bored and move on. I turned away from him and gazed out over the lake again. "Lots of rubbish in the lake", he observed. "All comes in from the islands". At this point I started to feel ashamed that I automatically treat every Nicaraguan with such suspicion. Maybe he was just curious to speak to one of these foreigners who have invaded his town, his home? Wouldn't I be curious too if a Nicaraguan turned up in my town? So I answered that yes, it was a shame. He turned towards the lake too. Then he asked me for the time. I looked at my watch and answered that it was 4pm. He nodded then started to leave. As he passed in front of me he suddenly stopped and the next thing I knew he'd drawn a pistol and, holding it sideways like you see those bad-asses in the movies do, it was pointed at my stomach. "Give me your money and your camera" he said. I'm not entirely sure what thoughts raced through my head. There wasn't much time to think of anything. However I believe it was a mixture of: "see, never trust anybody", "wtf am I doing down in this deserted area on my own anyway?" and "shit I have my camera, my iPod touch, my wallet and my money belt with $300 in it on me. How much am I going to lose?" I reached into my pocket and pulled out the first thing that came to hand. It happened to be my camera, with all my diving shots of manta rays and bull sharks, all my sunsets from Ometepe, all the pictures of the people I'd met on my week's holiday. As I handed it over with these thoughts in my head, I couldn't help but blurt out, "dame la tarjeta" - "give me the (memory) card". He just replied, "fuck you!". I asked again, in English this time. Same reply, as he tucked the pistol back into his belt and ran away and out across the street right in front of a passing car.

There was nothing for it but to head back towards the centre and hope nobody else moved in on me as I went. As I left the lake front, maybe 150m from where the incident had happened, I passed an elderly man who had been there the whole time and must have seen what happened. I looked at him and he looked back at me with something in his eyes that said, "I'm sorry, but that's what happens here".

I guess if the world was fairer and things were divided equally among all men, there would be no pressure for people to resort to this kind of action in order to make a few dollars to survive. It's ironic, or perhaps providential, that this should happen to me for the first time just as I'm having thoughts about my attitude to the travelling that has dominated my life for the last eleven years.

That trip through Asia is still real tempting though... :-)

-Phil

*The answer actually probably has much to do with the English pirates who used to sail up the Rio San Juan and attack the city!

Monkey Point

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to go on another community trip, this time to a place called Monkey Point, a mixed Mestizo and Creole village that lies two very rough sea hours to the south of Bluefields.

Monkey Point

Monkey Point is probably blueEnergy's most succesful installation in Nicaragua, which is to say that the turbine is working well, there are numerous households benefitting from the power provided, and the community is organised enough and harmonious enough to efficiently collect tariffs from the villagers for the power they use, and to reinvest it in the upkeep and development of the system. In addition, the power from the turbine lights the local school (also used for regular community meetings) and a small community center. My tasks on the trip were to install lighting and power points in said community centre, replace some ageing cables, replace the old storage batteries with some newer ones and also to audit the energy needs of the health center which is next on the list of projects that the village's energy commision has prioritised.

Me & Amy

Another of the tasks on my agenda was to carry out a training workshop for the villagers on how to correctly raise and lower the turbine. Although the turbine has been installed for a couple of years and the community has raised it and lowered it several times succesfully (e.g. during last year's hurricane), it had been observed by one of the volunteers that they weren't using the correct technique and that the method they used may potentially be dangerous. So we felt it was time for some refresher training on use of the pulleys, coordination of the procedure and safety aspects. However, it takes 14 villagers to raise and lower the turbine, and we were unable to interest more than four people to come to our training session. The reason - there was a crisis meeting underway regarding the fishing situation in the village. I joked with Jorge, my Nicaraguan colleague, that these people had their priorities all wrong. Jorge looked me straight in the eyes, deadly serious - "energía es una buena cosa, pero la pesca es una cuestión de sobrevivir" - energy's all well and good, but fishing is a matter of survival.

Discussing the freezer with the assembly

blueEnergy has worked hard and achieved much in bringing lighting to Monkey Point, but that's just the start. Until enough power can be generated that something productive can be done with it, lives aren't really going to change. Already though that is starting to happen. The Nicaraguan ministry of health, MINSA, is providing a freezer for vaccines for the village health center, and blueEnergy will help ensure that there is power to run it 24/7, 365 days a year. Whether that is by tapping into the existing wind turbine or installing new solar panels is still under investigation, but it is a good example of how productive uses for power can be found beyond simple lighting, TV and radio.

Monkey Point Sunset

How Not To Learn Spanish

One of the reasons I was excited to come to Nicaragua was for the chance to improve my Spanish, the basics of which I picked up on my travels through Central and South America a few years ago. I figured that living in a Spanish-speaking country for half a year, working with Spanish-speaking colleagues, being exposed to the language almost 24/7, I would inevitably leave here more or less fluent. Well, four months in and it actually feels like my Spanish has gone backwards rather than forwards. OK, I have a better technical vocabulary now and can tell you the spanish words for "wind turbine", "battery", "wire" and so on, but in terms of pure social communication, I feel less competent now than before. I still can't really say much more than ""buenas dias, como estas?" to the mamas that cook our lunch for us. I have more success chatting with some of the French volunteers who prefer to talk in Spanish than English, but that's mainly because I can just throw in an English word when I get stuck.

I think there are two main reasons why things are this way. Firstly, the local Nicaraguan accent is so bloody difficult to understand, with dropped s's everywhere, swallowed syllables and use of the vos form instead of tu (meaning a whole new verb conjugation to learn, as if there weren't enough already). Any attempt at a conservation quickly degenerates into a frustrating round of me asking people to repeat themselves a dozen times.

The other reason is the fact that I have just spent the last six years fighting to understand and be understood in German, and I really do feel a case of language learning fatigue. Although by the time I left Germany I was reasonably fluent, I still never felt really free when it came to expressing myself. I mean, I could do way more than just get my meaning across, but at the same time I always felt restricted and sort of trapped by my limited vocabulary and range of expressions. Now that I am trying to learn Spanish I feel like I'm right back at square one again, and it is just far too hard to find the motivation and enthusiasm necessary to stick my nose in a grammar book and move beyond the basics.

Meanwhile, on the work front, nothing much new to report. The biodigester construction, after weeks of delay, is finally about to start; mainly because the non-stop torrential rains that have been falling since friday threaten to cause the entire hillside behind Guillaume's house to slide down into the hole he dug for it. Nothing moving on the 17' turbine - sadly there is no chance that it will be built before I leave here in a month's time.

I'll just leave you with some photos from a trip me and three of the volunteers took to the Kahka Creek Forest Reserve a couple of weekends ago. Getting there took a two hour panga (fibreglass boat) ride across Pearl Lagoon to the Garifuna village of Orinoco. Then a 90 minute trip on the most unstable canoe I've ever sat in (it felt like sitting on top of a pile of books), and finally an hour's hike through cattle pastures before we arrived at the lodge on the edge of the jungle. The reserve is 600 hectares in size and has been in the process of being reforested since its establishment in 2000. The staff at the reserve are conducting various investigations into ways of speeding up the reforestation process. For example, they explained to us that by removing the vines that otherwise smother the trees, the trees grow faster. However, they then discovered the hard way that the vines actually help to make the forest more resistant to hurricanes, by anchoring the trees to the ground much like the guy wires of our turbines, and also binding individual trees together to form one giant interlinked structure. Learned the hard way, as three major hurricanes have struck the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua in the last three years, compared to a historical average of only one every ten...

Corn Islands

Wow! Another month goes by without a blog post! Where does the time go?? I'm working so hard that the weeks just fly by...

It's not all work, work, work here of course. Occasionally we get some time off to ourselves... so when blueEnergy shut down for Semana Santa (Holy Week), I took off for a week's trip to the Corn Islands. These two tiny specks of sand lie about 70 miles off shore from Bluefields and pretty much correspond to the typical Carribean island stereotype: warm blue water, coral reefs, white sand, palm trees, laid-back people and lots of reggae music. Whilst Bluefields (to me at least) definitely feels like a Latin American town, the vibe on the Corn Islands is 100% Caribbean. English (well, Caribbean English) is the language of communication and Bob Marley tunes ring out from every bar. People say that the Corn Islands represent an older, less commercialized Caribbean as it was on more famous islands such as Jamaica 50 years ago, before the advent of mass tourism and giant cruise ships. Little Corn, the smaller of the two islands, is particularly sleepy. It's only 1.5km long by a few hundred metres wide, and there are no roads, just a small network of interconnected concrete paths that link the hotels, bars, the two dive shops and the village.

Of course the real reason I went there was for the diving. To tell the truth, the diving is kinda OK but not spectacular. Like most of the diving I've done in the Caribbean, there just don't seem to be many fish. Coral is in reasonable condition though, visibility is generally pretty good and it's WARM! There are supposedly frequent sightings of hammerhead sharks at a channel off the east coast of Little Corn, but I didn't see any. I did see quite a few eagle rays, big stingrays, a few nurse sharks and lots of lobsters.

Anyway, for now I'll leave you with a few photos, including a shot of the view from Casa Iguana, probably the nicest place to stay on Little Corn. I, of course, stayed in one of the cheap places down on the beach :-)

Cheers,

Phil

On routine, work, a new gig and some rather good news...

It's been a long time since the last blog post - nearly a month. That's not because there's nothing been happening and I've had nothing to write about, but at the same time it's not that I've been so busy and occupied that I haven't had time to sit down and write. It's basically just because we have a kind of routine here which revolves around our communal living situation, and it's just too easy to fall into the habit of spending free time relaxing in the lounge strumming a guitar, or sitting out back playing dominoes, rather than knuckling down in front of the computer and writing.

It's kind of ironic that one of the reasons I think I can never settle anywhere for very long is that I have a fear of routine and of time passing me by too quickly. Yet in many ways there is more routine in my daily life here, and time is passing more quickly, than back in Germany. Every morning starts the same - I get up around 7:30, grab some toast and coffee downstairs then head to the office in INATEC where I sit at my computer and work on my projects, occasionally venturing up to the workshop to show my face and see what's going on. At 10 the boy who sells the paties comes round and I buy two of his tasty spicy paties for 10 cordobas (30p). At 12:30 we all head back up to the main house for lunch, cooked by the mamas, and at 1:30 we head back down to the office to carry on working. People start drifting out of the office around 5pm, but I generally stay till around 5:45, when it's getting dark and the street dogs start getting nasty. Once home I have my (cold) shower, dry off and head downstairs to see who's around and what dinner plans are. Occasionally we go out to eat but usually we make something, nine times out of ten some variation on pasta with onion, garlic and tomatoes, or "toe-may-toes" as most people here call them.

And that pattern repeats itself every day, except for the occasional trips out to the communities. All this is not to say that things are boring - far from it. I'm enjoying life here hugely, still learning lots and generally having a great time. I am still working primarily on the 17' turbine and the biodigester. The focus of my turbine report has changed a little in the last couple of weeks. Originally I was supposed to produce a report detailing to our management how much it would cost to develop and build the 17' turbine, and the intention was that blueEnergy would fund it from their R&D budget. However, like all NGOs these days (I guess), money is tight at blueEnergy at the moment and it has been decided to try and find an external funder/partner for the 17' turbine. So I have been rearranging and rehashing the report a bit to make it into a document that can be sent to potential funders as a proposal. That should be ready in the next few days. On the biodigester front, having expored several potential designs, I have now arrived at what I believe is the "right" design for our needs, basically a fairly light modification to a design that's used in a few places around the world already. Things are only really being complicated somewhat by bossman G's propensity to think bigger than is perhaps achievable - every time I show him a design, I see his eyes light up as he dreams of all the extra possibilities that open up. Now he wants to plonk his workshop on top of the digester (don't ask me why). However I'm confident I can rein him in a little and I'm hoping that construction work will start in the next couple of weeks.

This week we had were visited by a group from MIT in Boston. Amy, a PhD student working on charcoal production in developing countries, brought three undergrad students down to visit blueEnergy and see what we get up to, and in return they gave us a fascinating workshop on how to produce charcoal from waste products like coconut husks and sugar cane bagasse. Due to me owning a large, impressive-looking camera, I was given the job of accompanying the group for the week and documenting their trip in photo and blog form. That meant I got to tag along on their trip to Kakhabila, a nice chance to break up the aforementioned routine for a couple of days. There are a few more university visits in the pipeline for the coming weeks, and the report I'm writing will be posted on the bE website as a tool to attract more (and thereby bring some more funds to blueEnergy). I'm hoping to make this a permanent gig and get to go on all the trips these groups will be making.

Whilst on the subject of universities, some good news came in during the three weeks since my last post - I got accepted onto the Atmosphere/Energy Masters program at Stanford University in California! Seeing as probably the main reason for my coming to Nicaragua and joining blueEnergy at all was to strengthen my university applications, it's job done really. But the experience and knowledge I'm gaining here will also help me, I believe, to get some research work with some of the professors at Stanford so that I can help fund my time there. Because a Stanford education doesn't come cheap...

Next week is Semana Santa, or Holy Week, and we all have the week off here in Bluefields. I'm heading out to Little Corn Island for some snorkelling, diving and hammock time. I actually went there a couple of weeks ago just for the weekend, but this time I've got six days to chill out by the blue Caribbean sea. Report and pictures coming up in the next blog!

Phil

Trip to Kahkabila & Set Net

Last week I went on a four day trip to two of the communities that we operate in - Kahkabila and Set Net. Our job was to check up on the wind turbine at Kahkabila which had been reported as not working, and to do some maintenance work on the community installation in Set Net as well as install some small domestic systems.

The two hour boat trip to Kahkabila took us up through the jungle and mangrove swamps that line the various rivers and waterways that link Bluefields lagoon with Pearl lagoon, the next one to the north. After a quick stop in the town of Pearl Lagoon to drop off some things that we only needed in Set Net, we carried on across the lagoon to Kahkabila, getting thoroughly soaked in the process as the wind came up and our little boat struggled to ride the waves.

In Kahkabila we went to examine one of the two wind turbines that blueEnergy have installed there, as it had been reported to not be working. A quick check on the turbine itself showed no obvious problems, but once we checked the battery bank that it was connected to, the problem was clear. Somebody had for some reason moved one of the positive wires from the turbine and connected it to the negative terminal on one of the four batteries. That had led to the battery getting a reverse charge, and had thrown the system voltages completely out of kilter. This was responsible for the strange behaviour of the turbine. There wasn't much we could do except disconnect the battery and take it back to Bluefields for examination, although Jono (head of our technical department) figured it was probably ruined. At $400 a battery, it was an expensive mistake.

Kahkabila is a pretty community of around 800 mainly Miskitu people with houses scattered around a large football field which reminded me of an English village green. There are at least three school buildings, three churches, a medical centre and a basketball court. The setting on the edge of Pearl Lagoon is quite idyllic. However blueEnergy's work there was rendered somewhat superfluous when, pretty much unannounced and definitely unexpectedly, the Nicaraguan national grid arrived there late last year. With our work done, we spent the late afternoon on a short hike out through the jungle to a new eco-lodge that's being built on a peninsula to the north of the village. We slept that night in hammocks in the old school house, after a big meal of rice, beans and plantain in the house of the community leader.

Next day we motored back across a much calmer sea to Pearl Lagoon again to pick up the things we needed for Set Net. The wind was really blowing though as we made our way to the exit of the lagoon and the route out to the open Caribbean. At the police check point at the mouth of the lagoon they told us we'd never make it to Set Net in those conditions. They were wrong, and ninety bone jarring, spray drenched minutes later we had arrived. Set Net is a very different place to Kahkabila. We arrived to find gale force winds, rough seas and grey skies. The community is nothing more than a string of houses lined up along the top of the beach, exposed to the full force of the Caribbean winds, many (including that of our hosts) constructed from little more than corrugated iron and what appeared to be the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the beach through the centuries. There's no chance of the Grid arriving there anytime soon. Sitting in the smoky kitchen of our hosts, the Hudson family, listening to them speaking in English, accents heavy with Caribbean tones (some would call it Creole but it wasn't hard to understand at all), and listening to the wind battering the walls and roof outside, I couldn't shake the impression of a people wrenched from their homes in Africa by the colonial powers all those centuries ago, transported around the world in service of the Empire and simply then marooned here, in the least hospitable place imaginable.

After lunch, as Jono and Pedro headed off to relocate the blueEnergy battery bank and control panel from the school, which lost its roof in a hurricane last autumn, to the church, I headed off with Francois to a neighbouring house to install some new lighting and check up on its solar installation which was playing up. In addition to wind turbines, blueEnergy also offers heavily subsidised individual domestic systems consisting of a small solar panel, a battery and charge controller and two or three LED or CFL lights.

While I installed two new lights, Francois checked the system and found that the battery had been left discharged for some time which had damaged it. Next day, Francois & I had three new systems to install. For me it was quite daunting... with no training and little clue, I was suddenly let loose on people's houses and expected to install whole lighting systems. The houses may not have been much to look at, but they were still people's homes and I was quite nervous screwing into their ceiling beams and drilling holes in their walls. That was compounded by the whole family sitting around me, men, women and children watching every move I was making. But when it was finished, and Francois connected the solar panel, and their faces were lit up by the light I had installed.... that was really a very rewarding feeling indeed.

Meanwhile, the wind had died off, the sun had come out and Set Net didn't seem like nearly such a desolate place anymore. I almost grew to like it, and I definitely grew to like our warm, domino playing hosts. Hopefully I will get more chances to go back to Kahkabila and Set Net in the next few months. For now though, I am back in Bluefields and working feverishly on our new biogas generator plans!!

Laters,

Phil

Some thoughts on why we build wind turbines at all...

There is a certain irony hidden in the title I chose to give my blog. “En Un País Ventoso” is spanish for “In A Windy Country”, but in actual fact, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua is not a particularly windy place at all. Average wind speed here over the course of a year (neglecting those times when the occasional hurricane blows through) is 3.4m/s, or about 6mph. Compare that to around 5-6m/s for my home in the UK, which is not exactly considered a particularly windy place itself, and you might start to wonder - why choose to build wind turbines here at all? Surely one thing there is plenty of in Nicaragua is sun - maybe solar panels are a better choice for renewable power generation than wind turbines? Or, if the amount of energy needed for a project demands a wind turbine, why not just import cheap mass-produced ones from China?

If you did wonder any of these things, you'd be getting to the core of what blueEnergy is doing here. These and similar questions came up during January's induction program for the new volunteers. In many cases, Guillaume & Mathias (the "management") admitted that they didn't have answers and were still wrestling with the implications.

blueEnergy's emphasis is on sustainability and self-sufficiency. They won’t be here forever, and there will not be an endless stream of funders and donors waiting to subsidise energy systems in these communities. One of the aims of the work here is to build capacity and to engage and stimulate the local economy so that it can become a self-sustaining entity. This is the reason why the turbines are made locally, using locally sourced materials and a local workforce. Solar panels, on the other hand, have to be imported - they cannot be made locally. That isn't to say that there aren't cases where they are the most appropriate solution, indeed they are a vital component of the hybrid systems that blueEnergy installs here. And even though they aren't made locally, their procurement still stimulates local supply chains and the energy they generate still contributes to improving the quality of life of the recipient communities. The same is true for some of the more complicated electronics that go to make up the battery charging circuitry of blueEnergy’s installations, such as inverters and charge controllers. But nevertheless, the most impact can be made by engaging as much as possible local labour and suppliers.

So, what’s my part in all this so far? Well, I have been put in charge of the design and development of a new, bigger turbine. This baby is going to be 17’ in diameter, and should generate about twice the energy per year of the current 12’ machines. That means in any given community, more lights can be installed, more TVs powered, more mobile phones charged – or it could open the door to more productive uses, such as powering an ice maker (to keep fish fresh till it gets to market*) or a grinder to grate coconuts and extract their oil. Of course a bigger turbine also means a bigger alternator attached to it, a bigger tower to lift it up into the wind, and heavier duty electrics to handle all the power. For someone who came into this knowing pretty much nothing about electrics beyond the little I could remember from A-level physics, it’s been a challenging couple of weeks bringing myself up to speed on a lot of this stuff. In some ways I’ve felt a little guilty that I’ve basically been spending my time training myself up, gaining knowledge that I’ll take away and use later in life, and haven’t contributed anything productive to blueEnergy yet. But it’s still early days. I feel like I now have a good grasp of the alternator design and the balancing that has to be done between performance, cost and feasibility of actually making the thing in the workshop conditions that exist here. I think the alternator is the most complicated bit though, and the rest of the design should be fairly straightforward from here on.

My initial task is to produce a report to management which will help them to decide whether to go ahead with the project and find the funds necessary to commence it. It’s going to be one hell of a report, I can tell you, but my only worry is that the whole decision making process and subsequent identifying and allocating of funds might take so long that I won’t actually still be here to see the thing get built. That would be a frustrating conclusion, although I would still have the satisfaction of knowing that I made my own contribution, however small.

I have also been assigned to work on a gasification project for a Garífuna community in Pearl Lagoon. The goals here are still somewhat vague and there are various ways of generating fuel gas from biomass, but it looks like the project will involve taking a biomass feedstock (e.g. dried coconut husks), heating it up so that it gives off gas which can then be stored and burned to produce electricity in a generator, or maybe used to power an outboard motor. Again something I know next to nothing about but something I am very interested in learning about. More on this later (if it takes off).

Tomorrow I am heading off to a community called Set Net to help carry out repairs on a system that was damaged by the hurricane that passed by north of here late last year. This will be my first experience of what things are like out in the communities we are working with – a chance to appreciate things from their perspective and also an opportunity to understand the complications and constraints that exist there. More about that in the next post!

Till then,

Phil

*Actually, this has been tried and didn’t really work. Nobody wants to buy frozen fish from the communities when they can get freshly caught fish direct in Bluefields.

En Un País Ventoso

First the basics:

I'll be spending the next six months until July 2010 working for blueEnergy - link's over there on the right somewhere - see if you can find my bio!

So... I arrived here in Bluefields, Nicaragua, two weeks ago as one of seven new volunteers to join the fifteen already here. It's a mixed bunch, mainly French and American volunteers, but there is one other Brit, a Canadian, a Portugese and two Argentinians. I'm sharing a room with a top bloke from San Francisco called Ramin. Our room is in the main blueEnergy house, which is great as we have things that the other three smaller houses lack, such as Wi-fi internet and a well-stocked kitchen.

First week was spent on an induction program designed to bring us up to speed on the background, history, technology, and future plans of blueEnergy, as well as issues such as life in the volunteer houses, safety in Bluefields, and the ethnic composition of the peoples of the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. It's hard to imagine a more ethnically diverse place outside of a major city. There are six major groups living in Bluefields and the surrounding areas: Spanish-speaking Mestizos (largely immigrants from the Pacific coast) and English-speaking Creoles (descendants of people brought over from Jamaica), Garifunas (descendants of African slaves brought by the Portuguese), and three indigenous groups - the Miskitus, Sumus and Ramas. The language of business and commerce here is very firmly Spanish, but walking around Bluefields I've heard mostly English being spoken.

I am working on the Technical Team, officially as an Energy Project Engineer. For those who were asking exactly what I'd be doing, here at last a bit of detail: my first two assignments are to lead the design and development of the new 17' wind turbine, and to work with my colleague Pedro on a bio-gasifier for one of the communities on the coast. More on these projects in the next update!

For now, here's a link to a short video I made of Bluefields and some of our wind turbines in action.

On my next post, when I get round to it, look forward to some more details on what exactly blueEnergy is doing here, some reflections on that and my part in it all.

Hasta luego,

Felipe