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Burmese Times #7

12/1/2014

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I arrived back in Burma in December, fully hoping to take the first steps in building the Solar Roots Renewable Energy Training Center. But that proved to be difficult due to the local political situation in the Gorka village. The village headman and the Abbot were not seeing things eye to eye. I was advised to put my plans on hold until things cooled down. It was a salutary lesson for me in politics of religion and the lack of tolerance and trust still widespread in this country. We'll see what 2015 brings.
​
So I moved back into my old room at St Mathews Orphange Center and started doing trainings.
New Years was spent with the kids who delighted in the Kachin tradition of pounding sticky rice to within an inch of it's life, and then  eating copious quatities of the resulting flattened glutinous stuff.

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Then it was time to start trainings again. I began in SMOC itself with the same 5 brick stove that I had started to use in Haiti, passed to me by my good friends and mentors, Jon and Flip Anderson. Here we see Noh Noh chopping rice straw that will be mixed with clay to provide the insulation in the brick. Noh Noh has done trainings with me before and he generously provided the clay we needed. It looked good coming out of his rice field, it felt good when being mixed with the straw, but yet again, it proved to be of inferior quality and crumbled when heated to high temperatures. But that wasn't till later.....
In the next picture we see the mud and straw stove performing well - the downfeed working just as intended.


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Burmese Times #6

7/1/2013

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Lashio

I had made an effort to be in contact with the Metta Development Foundation, which is the largest and most competent of the local NGOs in Myanmar. I had previously met the Director, Sai Sam Kham on a couple of occasions and this year, I was determined to do a joint project with them. We decided on a Stove and PV Training in Lashio, which is the largest town in Northern Shan State, not too far from the border with China.
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I took a funky train to Lashio that took 11 hours instead of 4 hours by road. It was fun, passing through isolated villages with no road connection. People generously shared their food with me. It was worth doing once.................
The training lasted 11 days and was held in the Metta demonstration farm, just outside town. Set in 30 acres of forest and paddy fields, this site was perfect. The participants were from all over Myanmar, from Mytkina in the north to Bogalay in the south – I was honored that people had traveled so far to take my training. These participants were a somewhat specialized group in that they were already employed as community activists and technicians. They indeed proved to be a hard group to impress with my renewable bells and whistles, but by the end, I had won them over and they genuinely thanked me for the new knowledge they had gained.
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The students experiment with Orientation and Tilt Angle to optimize solar output
As always, I myself learned some valuable lessons during the training. This time, I discovered that there are better clays than the one I had used at the two Asia Light trainings, which did not produce really strong bricks. Mr Lum Po, the farm manager kindly showed us where the best clay was to be found. It turned out that at the bottom of the irrigation ditches feeding the paddy fields there was a rich black clay and elsewhere there was a an outcrop of thick brown clay. These proved to be far superior to the clays I had used before. Mr Lum Po also showed us some termite hills and knowing that repairs to brick houses in Madagascar were made with termite clay, famed for it's stickiness and strength, I thought I would try that too.

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Burmese Times #2

4/1/2012

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Mandalay

The beauty of the three-syllable name alone conjures up swaying palm trees, exotic scents in the tropical evening breeze and a Shangri-la sense of peace and tranquility. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Mandalay is a modern, business-minded city, laid out on a strict grid pattern that is usually dusty and insufferably hot and noisy. As they asked George Best, during his decline from youthful soccer hero to drunkard and buffoon, “where did it all go wrong?” The blame lies largely at the feet of Rudyard Kipling, poet laureate of the British Empire, who composed “The Road to Mandalay”, while spending time in Mawlamyine, a languid port in the south of the country. He never actually visited Mandalay, but that didn’t deter him from placing it on a bay, with a British soldier  waxing sentimental about his Burmese girlfriend and the tinkling temple bells. This poem, later put to music, became a very popular song with the British troops in WW2 and indeed, my father used to sing it with gusto. Perhaps in a case of life imitating art, British troops did indeed take the “Road to Mandalay”, when they returned from India to retake the city from the Japanese in 1945, after some fierce fighting. Bizzarly, the British forces included Idi Amin and President Obama’s grandfather!
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One of Mandalay' common sights, soon to disappear, in the drive towards modernity - it's the Mazda 1960s mini pick-up. Also known to Jim and I as the "Clown Car"
Mandalay had enjoyed a brief period as the capital of Burma, just before the annexation of Upper Burma by British forces in 1885. Several previous, much more ancient capitals , such as Sagaing and Amarapura are located nearby, but they are now dusty backwaters, eclipsed by Mandalay’s rise as the new commercial center of Upper Burma. Commercial ‘epi-center’ might be more apt as Mandalay is the prime destination for much of the Chinese investment in Burma and distribution center for products from China. From only 5% of the population 10 years ago, Chinese residents of Mandalay are now estimated at 20%. Large multi-story hotel blocks are springing up everywhere, new car showrooms proliferate, all financed by Chinese dollars and even Chinese schools are opening for business. Many Burmese are beginning to feel resentment over the power and domination of their neighbor to the North. To adapt the old Mexican adage, “Poor Burma! So far from God, so close to China!”
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An all-action shot of our languid class in Mandalay!

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Burmese Times #3

4/1/2012

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More PV Courses

Working with Alin Ein again, I made a visit to their demonstration farm near Mawhbi, about 2 hours north-east of Yangon. They had contracted to have a solar PV system installed by a local company about 6 months ago and it was already having problems. This was a great opportunity for the class to get on their thinking caps and get out their testers. After being gently led through the troubleshooting procedure, the class determined that the battery was badly damaged and would never work again. I replaced the primitive charge controller with a new one from the US, bought a new battery and the system was able to realize its full potential.
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Checking out the solar irradiation level at Mahwbi. Is that the shadow I see on the panel, along with much dust? Tut, tut. I'll have to go over those two items again in class!
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Doing hands-on testing with the Karen students in Toungoo. Looks like serious business!
The following week I went up to Taungoo, near Nay Pyi Daw, the new capital. There I had a large class of over 20 people, several of whom already had solar systems, but who still had many questions. There were the same explanations to be given  around why a car battery will never work well in a solar system and why discharging a battery down to zero is the worst thing you can do to it. These are hard lessons to accept for people who are totally stretched just to buy that old car battery.

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Burmese Times #1

3/1/2012

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Rangoon
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I was thrilled to arrive back in Rangoon, as I had enjoyed it so much when I was here with Jim last year. I stayed at the same Japanese-run guesthouse, ate at the Nepali restaurant, and patronized Nilar’s yoghurt (by-day) and whisky (by night) shop, (I only go during the day!). Downtown Rangoon is a chaotic mess of overcrowded belching buses, broken sidewalks, dilapidated colonial architecture and foul and delicious odors. Street vendors almost block the sidewalk hawking everything from ancient British-era textbooks to as-yet unreleased Hollywood DVDs. However, the item that fascinates me the most is the small mechanical people counter, you know the one with the button and the revolving numbers? Almost every hawker has one or two and some have several models to choose from. Who is buying these things? How many jobs involve counting to the degree that you need a counter that goes up to 999? How many entry level job starters are there in Rangoon that need to buy a new set of clothes, a little set of stacking stainless steel tins for their lunch and a brand new people counter? I sometimes feel I may go to my grave without cracking this particular enigma.
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The ubiquitous people counters hold pride of place at the center of this street vendor's display.
Downtown Rangoon was laid out by the British during their colonial occupation from 1852 till 1947 and there are still many impressive Victorian buildings gently falling down from their former glory as physical expressions of British imperial will. But it is the people that impress most. At the time of Burmese independence in 1947, Rangoon was largely populated by migrants from India, some involuntary, but many seeking opportunity in a less competitive environment. Most left following Independence or in the purges after 1962.  However, the remaining residents of Indian descent still dominate the street culture of downtown, with their restaurants, street stalls, tea houses, temples and mosques. There is, of course, a Chinatown, and that’s where I go to get my solar panels. Rangoon sits on a bend in the Yangon River, which can handle ocean-going ships and it still has many of the warehouses and go-downs from when Brittania ruled the waves. An odd connection for me is that during the colonial period, commerce in Burma was dominated by Scots.  Steel Bros (Rice), The Bombay-Burmah Trading Corporation (Timber), Burmah Oil and The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company were all in Glaswegian hands. It’s a city of glaring contrasts – if you raise your eyes to take in a gleaming new tower, you risk falling 6ft into an open sewer. As Paul Simon so aptly put it, we live in an era of lasers in the jungle!
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One of the many colonial buildings in Rangoon, now mouldering, but soon to find a new lease on life as a hotel or a corporation HQ.

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Tenth Epistle from the Border - Nu Po News

3/1/2012

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​I was invited to give a Rocket Stove workshop at Nu Po Refugee camp a few weeks ago and gladly accepted. It would delay my arrival in Myanmar by two weeks, but the prospect seemed well worth it. In the end I decided to give a solar PV training too and in order to transport all my material there I had to hire a pick up truck and driver for the day. One hundred dollars, but well spent, as I no longer had any restriction on the amount of gear I could bring. In order to get there,  we had to take the famous “Highway of Death” between Mae Sot and Umphang, which was so vividly described in my Fourth Epistle from the Border, see above. This crazy piece of road engineering has 1,200 bends in 160kms! If that were not enough to merit the above-mentioned moniker, during the 60’s to the 80’s there were many deaths from snipers belonging to the Thai Communist Party and local opium growers, two groups who sternly resented the interest the Thai government was taking in their respective affairs. However, those days are long gone and now tourism and the business generated by looking after Burmese refugees are the only games in town.
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One of the 1,200 bends along the Highway of Death
PictureHow I looked after my last Highway trip!
​My host was a genial Dutchman called Ton, who teaches at an economic development school in the camp and who has dedicated the last 15 years to this work in various camps up and down the border. Hats off to you, Ton!  He is a movie buff too and within a couple of days, the Nu Po Roxie was up and running.  Nu Po is very close to the Myanmar border and is set in beautiful mountain surroundings. Although only established five or six years ago, it has over 15,000 residents and they make up a diverse community indeed. Since it is just opposite Karen state, most of the residents are Karen, but there are also Kachin, Shan, Burman and many moslems. The moslems are the merchants and the teahouse operators.  Curiously, many camp residents did not need to flee for their lives, they came for the free educational opportunities or to try to be resettled in third countries. However, many others have harrowing tales to tell. One of my students had to flee Kachin state when his brother became a ‘person of interest’ because of his political activity. Another, older gentleman , a Burman, clearly had been an intellectual or a functionary of some kind and had to flee five years ago, leaving all behind him. These two were my most enth

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Market day inside the camp
PictureSifting crushed clay to get the fine powder
​On planning the stove training I decided to make insulative clay bricks for the combustion chambers and use square cooking oil tins as the containers. Luckily, there already existed demonstration videos on Youtube and I was able to project them for the participants to study. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I wonder what the calculation is for a moving picture? Although I had studied the videos carefully myself, I had never actually built any of these stoves or indeed fired any bricks. In the videos the clay came out of nice neat paper bags, clearly purchased from the neighborhood pottery supply store. I knew that wasn’t going to happen in Nu Po, but I trusted that at least one of the resourceful Karen would have some clay working experience. I was not disappointed. We dug the clay from an existing hole on the school grounds, pounded it into smaller pieces then sifted that through some fine mesh to obtain the clay powder we would need.

PictureThe wet bricks will lie in the sun for two days before being put in the kiln
For insulative material to mix with the clay we had three available choices, fine hardwood sawdust, rice husks and powdered charcoal. We used all three and experimented with proportions, as the videos were a little vague in that area. We made the brick molds from plywood and lined them with plastic sheets to make removal of the wet bricks easier, (or indeed, even possible!). Our kiln was a 55-gallon oil drum with the lid cut off and our heat source was rice husks.  I had chosen two different bricks shapes, one we called the Africa brick and one we called the Lao brick, after the origin of the videos we were watching. So, after making enough bricks for three Africa stoves and two Lao stoves we loaded up the kiln and held an official lighting ceremony. I was anxious that the husks would keep going out, but once well lit, they burned surprisingly consistently, until they hit the mass of clay bricks. We had packed the bricks too densely and there were not enough husks around them to sustain a burn. But after 48 hours, each brick got at least one side well cooked. The students repacked and another 48 hour firing was started. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the second firing was finished and I am waiting to hear news about the results.

PictureOur makeshift kiln was a regular puffin' Billy!
​While the kiln was in action we were not idle, no siree Bob! I explained the function and benefits of Pot Skirts and the participants brought their own pots for custom fittings. 
The older gentleman, mentioned above, took his creation home at lunchtime and came racing back in the afternoon with a pot twice as large, saying that his wife loved it and that she wanted another one for her gas stove. The advantage she saw was that it directed the heat away from her face.

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Several solar devices and testers were employed to illustrate basic electrical concepts
For the next four days I gave an introductory training in Solar PV. After much classwork and occasional sleepiness, we would emerge into the bright sunlight to demonstrate and test what we had learned with my show-and-tell bag of solar cells, fans and lights. The basic electric concepts of voltage, current, resistance, energy and power are difficult to master for most westerners and doubly so for those who are meeting them for the first time. However, without a decent grasp of these terms, no-one can design or troubleshoot a PV system. ​
PictureMr Cowboy checks to see that everything is flowing as it should
​We also visited three existing PV systems in the camp, which was extremely instructive, as all three suffered from one maladie or another. The batteries in the  large system at the camp administrative office had been allowed to boil off most their acid and thus were ruined.  The man charged with looking after the system, affectionately nicknamed Mr Cowboy, was not there when it was installed and had never received any maintenance training. What had been a good powerful system, now could only power two lights for 30 minutes before shutting down. Next we visited a private home where there was a panel and two batteries, but no charge controller. Normally, this is a no-no, but having two batteries ensured that there were never enough hours in the day to overcharge them. I recommended that the two batteries be joined together in parallel to equally charge them both. An amusing incident, (for everyone except the victim), happened at this house. Upstairs we met the family, including a chubby infant, and after reviewing the solar system, we descended to the ground floor to partake of some instant coffee. After a few minutes one participant started patting his head with a questioning look on his face as he surveyed the ceiling for the source of the droplets raining down on him.  This merely illustrates the ancient Karen proverb that goes “People who live in bamboo houses must always be ready for the occasional golden shower”. The last site visit was a shop where the panel was facing almost due North, and of course, contributing very little to the health and welfare of the batteries. We sorted that out and soon were on our way home, having learned much and help a little bit too.

PictureFamily selling cabbages at the market
​At the risk of boring the non-battery afficiandos in the audience, I would like to explain about how many of the camp residents get their electricity. There are several small hydro turbines and motor generators that put out occasionally wildly erratic voltages. These are used to charge old car batteries that are then connected to Burmese made-inverters to deliver a loose approximation of 220V for TVs and lights. The short life and poor performance of these batteries are due to several perfect-storm circumstances that not even the most valiant electro-chemical device could withstand. Here’s the sad tale: the batteries are only pressed into domestic service after they will no longer start cars, if they get water, it will be muddy stream water or rainwater, (rarely the mandatory distilled water), they will be discharged to within an inch of their lives on a daily basis and recharged by people who have only the vaguest idea about battery maintenance and no financial incentive to learn more. Oh, and did I mention that car batteries will inevitably have a short and unhappy life if used in deep cycle applications?  I had hopes of being able to improve the situation, but when one man asked me why he should take his battery back to the recharger before every last watthour had been squeezed out of it, I couldn’t come up  with a reason that made financial sense to him. Why take your pail to the dairy with some milk still in it? They’ll only charge you for your own milk! My entreaties about long term investments fell on deaf ears, as well they might for people who are grateful to still be alive and out of prison. ‘Nuff said about batteries.

PictureWe tried to hurry along the sun drying with a little turbo charge from the parabolic cooker!
​As the bricks gently cooked, we also installed a new solar system on the library building. I had intended to just purchase a small 12V system, as much for a teaching aid as anything else. But my purchase choices were limited and we ended up with a slightly larger 24V system, that will actually supply much of the electricity needed, much of the year. After 3 days of lectures and demonstrations, the students were ready for some hands-on work. Either I’m getting much better at this, or these participants were really bright, (a combination of the two I’m guessing), but the install went very smoothly with only discreet oversight and the occasional suggestion from myself.

PictureThe new 185 Watt panel on the Library building
With only two days left, the bricks were still not baked, so I started a new rocket stove design featuring a sheet metal combustion chamber. This was done to illustrate the use of another material and the example built by our Kachin participant was an object of beauty. This galvanized metal will only last a month or two, but I did bring some thicker stainless steel that they can use for the r​eal thing later on.

PictureSerious looking graduates from the solar class
​So ended a very successful and satisfying two weeks. All the participants were extremely grateful for the knowledge and skills imparted, including the megabytes of pdf documents on every subject from gasifiers to greenhouses. Solar Roots left behind a nascent collection of tools for stove building including an angle grinder and cordless drill and I hope some positive feelings about technology transfer and East-West cooperation.

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Malagasy Journal #4

8/16/2011

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PictureMatching lambas during a dance performance
Malagasy Style
The Malagasy people are actually very stylish dressers in my opinion. Perhaps not in a style recognized by the international community, (a bit like their government), but in a style at once personal and idiosyncratic. The love of bright colors is evident in the sheets, blankets and lambas that people swathe themselves and their babies in. The lamba is a multi-purpose sheet of cloth that is used as a sarong, a baby carrier or head wrap. It has deep significance in Malagasy culture and was traditionally woven from local thread. Now most women wear a mass produced lamba of printed fabric. One of the fashion idiosyncrasies is that men often wear garments in delicate hues and to see a man sporting a shirt in flaming pink or very feminine lime green is not so unusual. The further one is from the city and foreign influence the more individual stylistic expression reigns. One amazing phenomenon is the access Malagasy people have to very stylish and well tailored clothes second-hand from Europe. Many times I see people in $120 North Face or Polar Tec jackets that they picked up for $5 in the market. These clothes are donated to the equivalent of the Salvation Army in Europe and sold by the kilo to entrepreneurs who sell them at the local market.

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Fringed hat and lamba from above
​To my eye, perhaps the most stylish expression is to be found in the variety of head gear available. Many straw hats are sold, but not Panamas; they are more like the pork pie hats made famous by Lester Young and Dizzy Gillespie, with a beautiful line of pink woven through them. Of course they are worn at a jaunty angle, sometimes pulled down to shade the eyes. Women often wear straw hats with a bowl crown, a large brim with a tattered edge and the resulting dappled sunlight on the face is quite, quite alluring. The French influence is evident in the proliferation of berets and caps worn by city men. In fact, this year after visiting Laos, Vietnam and Madagascar, all ex-French colonies, I conclude that the main cultural legacy left by these gaullic invaders comprises of berets, baguettes, and petanque!
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The little multi-colored bowler hat is popular too.
Stovin’
I had intended to concentrate on improved cook stoves  this year, but the best laid plans on mice and men and well-meaning vahaza, (foreigners), gang aft aglay. However, I did make some inroads into learning about what stoves are available on the local market and I actually started a working relationship with two stove producers, M. Mamy and M. Roland Berma. M.Mamy and his extended family are really aluminum smelters to trade, producing spoons,cocottes (pots), and jewellery, all made from recycled aluminum window frames doors. By a great stroke of luck, I was led to their door and discovered that they had made the covers/pot supports for a series of stoves ordered by ADES, a Swiss NGO working principally with solar cookers. Straight away, I commissioned 10 new stoves to be built, that I named the ‘Apro-Acme’, since the design was actually spawned at the Aprovecho Research Center. I didn’t get much opportunity to test them out, but just before leaving I did discover that there has been design drift leading to the covers/pot supports being shorter than the original specification which diminishes the draft through the stove. Next year I will bring them a new cast iron model that will get them back on track to the original specs.
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The new 'Apro-Acme' stove
I did have M.Mamy make two pots with integral pot skirts, that is, another another  pot without a bottom that surrounds and is attached to the first one. This skirt captures the heat that is normally lost at the sides of the pot and forces it to scrape against the sides of the pot, thereby increasing the heat transfer into the pot and its contents. Increasing heat transfer into the pot is the Holy Grail of Stovers and it’s said that a pot skirt can reduce fuel consumption by 20-30%. We’ll see, I’m taking one back to the Aprovecho Research Center laboratory for testing.
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The new Acme integrated pot skirt hits the catwalk!
Malagasy Taxis
Most city taxis in Madagascar are old Renault 4s, sometimes up to 50 years old. There are a few Deux Chevaux, and a few more modern Renaults (from the 70’s), but the field is utterly dominated by the farmer’s friend, the Renault 4. It has numerous advantages including a really spongey suspension that survives well the many cobbled streets in Tana and other towns, it is extremely simple to repair, with all parts being easily available or easily fabricated locally, it’s economical on gas as there really isn’t much metal in it and you can still pick up a completely refurbished one for $3 to 4,000. At first I was puzzled by the constant smell of petroleum inside the taxis, until I realized that the one-liter plastic bottle at my feet was in fact always full of gas! This is because the high cost of fuel forces taxi drivers to buy only one liter at a time.
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When the Peugeot breaks down, there's always the ox-cart.
However, in the countryside, la brousse, the chariot of choice is the venerable Peugeot 404 pick up. These vehicles are unbelievable in their ruggedness and longevity. They have metal dashboards and so many welded repairs and replacement parts that they look like my uncle’s axe, that had 6 new handles and 3 new heads, but was still the best axe I ever had. Like the human body, the Malgasy Peugeot 404 seems to change its entire cell structure every 7 years! The only way to go from city to city is to take a taxi brousse which will usually be a 15 seater mini van, Toyoya or Mazda. This year I broke a couple of my personal bests in terms of cramming human bodies into vehicles: 25 into a 15-seater mini van and if you can believe it, 25 into a Peugeot 404 pick up, which had much baggage piled up on the metal cage + canvas “roof”, and  had two bicycles on top for good measure. Needless to say, we broke the transmission on that last mentioned voyage. I once saw a decal stuck on the side of a taxi brousse that, instead of saying “No Fear”, actually said “No Far”! A wee Scottish voice in my head said, “you’re no kiddin’ pal!” My record for shortest journey before breakdown was 500meters. Lastly, in some towns there are no taxis and one has to take a pousse-pousse, a rickshaw. I rapidly found out that there is no bodily position that can assuage the psychological discomfort that accompanies being pulled along by another human being. Arms akimbo, legs crossed or even arm slung casually over baggage – none of it works. It’s impossible to feel a l’aise while someone else sweats and struggles to get you from one place to another.
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Walking the last 7 kilometers with the driveshaft held overhead like a trophy from the hunt!
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A group of adherents in Soatanana watch the ritual washing of traveler's feet.
Soatana
While I was cooling my heels in Fianarantsoa, waiting for a PV project to be funded, I took a side trip with two French friends to the nearby village of Soatanana. Beautifully located next to a steep rock massif, this village is famous for being the center of an unusual Malagasy Christian cult. Founded in the 1890s by a Malagasy man who was seriously ill, then cured by divine intervention, the cult now has thousands of adherents and is to be found in all parts of the country. Defining features of this faith are that the members are always completely dressed in white, (to symbolize purity), their main form of worship is singing, they wash the feet of travelers and they do not pratice “second burial”, (which is common among most other groups). They do however, practice evangelism, which I was less keen on. Never-the-less, they treated us with great respect and welcomed us into their midst. We attended a Sunday mass with several hundred believers and enjoyed greatly their renditions of old hymns, in a distinctive Malagasy style.
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Sunrise in Mahazony. Hallelujah!
Mahazony and Miarnanarivo
Although the funding for the PV system on the new Maison de Vannerie, (basket weaving), in Ambohihamasina never did come through, Samantha at Feedback Madagascar did tell me about three villages with clinic solar systems that could use some help. The first clinic was in Mahazony and served a population of around 11,000. M.Hasina and his wife, the residents medics, put me up me in their house while I diagnosed the problems with the PV system, installed 7 years ago by Electriciens Sans Frontieres. The PV panels still worked, but the batteries were totaled and unbelievably, someone had wrecked the charge controller by brutally removing several of the key electronic components. Luckily, I had an exact replacement charge controller, but it was stored back in Tana, a two-day, several taxi brousse journey away! Since the batteries were only available in Tana anyway, I decided to make the trip.
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Mahazony village on the right, with the white clinic above and towards the center.
Joy was unbounded when I had completed the installation and the 10-room clinic plus the medics house were ablaze with light for the first time in four years. I also brought back a battery for the system in the little rooms made available to family members of patients, (more on that later). This trip I brought my newly purchased mountain bike which allowed me to visit the next village, Miarnanarivo, which has no taxi brousse service. There, the problem was, of course, a set of totaled batteries, but also some strangely low voltage readings on the solar panels. Upon further investigation I found that the panels had been incorrectly wired from the get-go and could never have kept the batteries charged under any circumstances. I rewired the panels, put in the new battery, (which the clinic guard from Mahazony had carried on the back of his bike for 2 hours), and the system fired up like a wee champ.
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Staff, patients and villagers at Mahazony clinic.
The system for the relatives of the Mahazony patients also suffered low voltage disease, so I rewired that panel too and they had electric light, probably for the first time in their lives. I was suddenly the most popular guy in town. A run for mayor of the commune was bandied about for a while, but I told them that I thought I really should learn their language before running for political office!
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The relatives get light, just like the patients.
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The future mayor of the commune with M.Hasina and his wife.
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Laos

4/6/2011

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I spent March and April this year in Lao PDR, the  People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. I had been in the capital, Vientiane, last June to interview with the Lao Institute for Renewable Energy, (LIRE), regarding the possibility of volunteering with them. So now I was joining their team of around 20 people, Lao and foreign, employees and volunteers, engineers and economists. LIRE does feasibilty studies, publishes reports and generally informs the debate on renewable energy in Laos.  I was hoping to head a small team to test charcoal burning stoves and perhaps to do some PV training with LIRE’s founding partner, Sunlabob. Labob is the Lao word for system, thus Sunlabob, the only professional renewable energy company in Laos, headed by an astute German ex-pat, called Andy.
There had been personnel changes since June and a change of focus at LIRE, so I did my best to fit in and be useful. 
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It gets pretty smoky when you light six charcoal stoves all at the same time!
By sheer coincidence, my friends at the Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon had been hired by the EPA to do a couple of workshops in Laos, and their visit just happened to coincide with my stint at LIRE. So, my first contribution was organize the “testing laboratory”, which was the broke-down garage outback of the LIRE office. I got electricity supplied, a good stock of wood and charcoal, fire prevention equipment and a myriad of small items that helped the actual testing go off smoothly. I was able to interface between LIRE, the other participating NGOs and the Aprovecho team, two of whom had not been to Asia before. Their presentation on stove design and testing in a big downtown hotel was well received. The actual testing was good fun as many participants, from different parts of Laos, as well as Vietnam and Thailand had never done anything like that before.
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The Hmong girls are leaning on an ancient stone quern, for grinding grains.
Vientiane is a somewhat sleepy capital, flat and dusty and situated on a bend in Mekong river. With 70% of the population still living in remote mountain villages, Laos is described as one of the poorest countries in the world, but that is not the impression one gets in the towns or the more accessible rural areas. There, the impression is of a country whose economy is really starting to take off, new 4x4s abound, consumer products are easily available and new Mcmansions are being built so fast, you would think that bricks were going to be outlawed next year! This is the same effect that I was to witness a couple of months later in Burma: namely, the energy radiating from the Chinese economy is giving all its neighbors a good suntan! Chinese investment in both countries is enormous and local markets are flooded with Chinese products, mostly of inferior quality. Some electrical statistics on Laos: 80% of the population is on the electric grid, 94% of the electricity comes from hydro electric dams, there are two giant dams already built and 20 more planned, including several on the Mekong itself. Who is financing and building these dams and will ultimately consume all that electricity? Why, the giant to the north, of course.
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Can you spot the MSG?
The Aprovecho team and a LIRE team including myself, spent a week in Savanakhet, the second largest town, giving a week-long stove testing workshop. Savanakhet was laid out by the French colonial administration and has wide boulevards and a spacious feel to it. It is a commercial hub, being situated on the Mekong at the Thai border, with Vietnam only a four hour drive away. Here, we conducted the Controlled Cooking Test, which consists of the same meal being cooked three times, by three different cooks on two different stoves.  As we carefully weighed the ingredients we recognised all of them except one, which was something like salt, but with longer crystals. In reply to our questions, we were told it was called “make better”. After further questioning we realized it was the dreaded MSG, seen above  in the packet with red printing. Over the 18 meals, the cooks used nearly one pound of the awful stuff!
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A family that makes charcoal stoves together, stays together!
The most interesting event during that trip was a visit to a local, family run stove factory. Everyone was involved from grandma to the little kids. Their production techniques were primitive and production low, but their enterprise and hard work were quite evident. Unfortunately, since USAID introduced the original “Thai Bucket” charcoal stove design twenty years ago, there has been quite a bit of “design drift” and use of cheaper materials which has led to less efficient stoves being produced.
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I wonder where the other parts of this vehicle are and what vernacular devices they are part of?
Back in Vientiane, I came across a company I felt sure the FBI would like to find out about. I thought perhaps it was the epi-center of intellectual property theft, (IPT), worldwide, as a huge awning proclaimed “The Idea Copy Center”. But on further investigation it proved to be just a hole in the wall, one machine operation. My dreams of cracking the IPT ring in Laos lay in tatters. Oh well!
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The fish pond in a remote mountain village
But then came the big trip that showed me the real Laos. It was to the north-eastern province of Xieng Khuan, around the area they call the “Plain of Jars”. Due to my presence, LIRE had been hired by a Swiss NGO to troubleshoot a solar water pumping system and to test some new stoves in remote Hmong villages in the highlands. Chanthapaseuth, my sturdy assistant, and I took the overnight bus to Phonesavanne, the regional capital. It’s at about 3,400 ft in elevation and a cool welcome change from the sticky heat of Vientiane. In fact, I was warned that temperatures in April might reach 110 degrees F in Vientiane, so I only brought T-shirts. Oh, the folly, Bruce! This year, nighttime temperatures sometimes plummeted to below 50 degrees and I had to buy a heavy sweater and two extra blankets to survive. But the next night it would be so hot that even a cotton sheet was too much. I blame the oil companies and global warming, I don’t know about you.
Part of our duties up there was to do tests on some Vietnamese-designed fixed cook stoves. These were made of local building bricks with a cement top, pretty massive fellows! We conducted the Water Boiling Test on three of these stoves and one traditional, 3-legged stove for comparison.  The massive stoves performed quite well, though it was a very small sample that we tested and the conditions were somewhat less than scientific.
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Our trainee stove testers take time out for a quick chat and a joke. The massive stove lurks behind.
But the most interesting part of the trip concerned the history of the Plain of Jars, both ancient and modern. Carved out of stone, some of the jars are very large, with mouths about 3ft wide.  Most researchers think that they were originally carved to contain the human remains of tribal leaders between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. The jars have been knocked over and lie at awkward angles, but this was nothing compared to what was to happen to the region during what is locally referred to the Second Indo-China War, which we know as the Vietnam War.
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A young woman transports her water the old fashioned way.
During that conflict, the North Vietnamese supplied their troops in the South by way of the famous Ho Chi Minh trail, part of which ran through the Plain of Jars. Laos, although a neutral country, not involved in the conflict, became the most most bombed country in the history of the world. Twenty four hours a day for almost nine years, B52s dropped bombs of all kinds, in an attempt to thwart the flow of materiel. Much of that ordinance failed to explode and is still lying under the ground on the Plain of Jars. Every year many hundreds of local people lose limbs and even their lives as they step on unexploded ordinance. The Phonesavanne area is full of reminders of that sad history – a local restaurant called “Craters”, which has shell casings up to 5ft high on its patio, the groups of white jump-suited de-miners who meticulously comb through the fields for UXO (unexploded ordinance) and the houses which sit atop 5ft shells used as support pillars. I was consulting with a family who melt waste aluminum to recast it into spoons and I was surprised to see that they used a shell casing, cut in half as a crucible. They asked me to redesign their wood- burning furnace incorporating the shell casing. When I asked if they wouldn’t run out of shells for this purpose, they looked at me if as I were weak in the head saying, “We will never run out of shells”.
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A US shell casing in the backyard of the headman.
The US has not stepped up to the plate and taken responsibility for this gross violation of human rights. Indeed, Australia provides more funding for de-mining than does America. But, almost unimaginably, the Lao people do not hold rancor in their hearts towards Americans. Most Laotians were not born when these events took place and the  government has pragmatically toned down its anti-imperialist rhetoric since the fall of the USSR.
The Laotians have to be the most mellow people in Asia. There is a regional proverb that I will paraphrase in closing:
“The Vietnamese plant and harvest the rice, the Thais sell it and the Lao listen to it grow!”
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Some of the tourist attractions on the Plain of Jars!
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Ninth Epistle from the Border - All About Stoves

1/28/2011

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PictureEff and I reworking a barrel lid
​I flew into Bangkok in mid-January, planning to take care of some dental work, buy some tools and be on my way to Sangklaburi in a week or ten days. Well, things took longer than I expected – the dental work was difficult, they didn’t have the new microscope necessary to safely do the root canal and I could only see the dentist on Sunday afternoons! It was great to get back to Sangkla and the house I share with Naam, – all my tools,  books and clothes were still there, if a little rusty, musty and foosty after  a 4-month rainy season, where everything starts moldering down and returning to its constituent elements. My friends were all still here and my favorite restaurants were still open – who could ask for anything more?  In fact though, Sangkla has changed quite a bit in the last year. It is now becoming a resort town for week-enders from Bangkok and has even had a write-up in the Lonely Planet, surely the kiss of death for a remote, lake-side village, tucked away in the hills leading to Burma.

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No, I'm not trying to weld the wood to the drum!
PictureCitar demonstrates the 'Acme 38' to a happy customer
​I flew into Bangkok in mid-January, planning to take care of some dental work, buy some tools and be on my way to Sangklaburi in a week or ten days. Well, things took longer than I expected – the dental work was difficult, they didn’t have the new microscope necessary to safely do the root canal and I could only see the dentist on Sunday afternoons! It was great to get back to Sangkla and the house I share with Naam, – all my tools,  books and clothes were still there, if a little rusty, musty and foosty after  a 4-month rainy season, where everything starts moldering down and returning to its constituent elements. My friends were all still here and my favorite restaurants were still open – who could ask for anything more?  In fact though, Sangkla has changed quite a bit in the last year. It is now becoming a resort town for week-enders from Bangkok and has even had a write-up in the Lonely Planet, surely the kiss of death for a remote, lake-side village, tucked away in the hills leading to Burma.

PictureThe 'Acme 64' goes through it's paces
​I hauled the welder and other tools from Bangkok to Sangkla by bus, a feat in itself! But imagine my chagrin and mounting frustration when I plugged in the welder and found it didn’t work. I asked NawPawLulu’s son-in-law, Eff, to help me out. He is a skilled welder and generally, a very handy guy, so I knew he would find the problem. Well, it turned out that a key wire had been left disconnected, inside the welder. I know nothing about welding, (other than it’s potentially dangerous), and I have thus been studying instructional videos on YouTube. The emphasis is on safety and proper attire. So, when I go to weld, I wear a long-sleeved jacket, a leather apron, the best shoes available, dark goggles, welding gloves etc, as per the instructions. So now, Eff goes to test the unit and weld a rocket elbow I had  already prepared – he’s wearing shorts, flip-flops and a muscle shirt!  He did accept my offer of dark goggles, though. Of course, he did a great job and didn’t burn himself. However, after a second day spent with Eff, I noticed that the top of one of his middle fingers was missing.........I think I'll stick with the sweaty protective clothing. My first welding attempts were very poor and very ugly. Now I’m getting the feel for it, although it may be some time till we open the Acme School of Welding (Asia).

PictureA stove and training manual delivered to NawPawLulu's Safehouse
​When I was searching for appropriate cooking pots, I went to Little India, which is a small enclave of people from the sub-continent, relocated inside Chinatown, Bangkok. I asked a young man to help and discovered he was from Nepal, of all places. Everyone he asked about my pots spoke Nepalese. It was quite dis-orienting. Then I met Citar, an employee of Children of the Forest. She is Nepalese too. Apparently, many Nepalese soldiers, (Gurkhas), were brought to this area to fight for the British against the Japanese during World War Two. I knew about the Nepal-Burma connection before, but it was a new twist to meet people who had settled in Thailand. South East Asia is a very ethnically mixed region indeed. I am looking forward to my visit to Laos in March and April, where there are many, many different ethnic groups.

PictureThe pot skirt can improve efficiency with other stoves, like this charcoal burner
​Well, my period in Sangklaburi is now finished and I’m off to Laos tomorrow night. Although things took longer than I expected, I feel I have achieved quite a lot. In the month that I actually spent in the workshop I build 6 stoves; an Acme 11, two Acme 38s, two Acme 64s and one big Mama Acme 200. (The numbers come from the capacity in liters of the barrel that houses the stove). I purchased and distributed about a dozen pots, complete with custom pot skirts. I trained two people in the basics of rocket stove theory and stove building. Lastly, I printed and distributed five training manuals on building rocket stoves. The stoves worked excellently and were received enthusiastically by their recipients. Now I’m looking forward to getting feedback about performance and ease of use, so I can make improvements in the future. The workshop is  all packed away now, but it can be set up again easily and Acme Stove Works (Asia) can go back into production next year. An exciting final note: there is every chance that I will spend the month of May in Burma, meeting with groups who want to learn more about renewable energy. My friend, Jim Connor, has just returned from Burma where he found a nascent green movement that is thirsting for the gospel of photovoltaics and improved cook stoves. Their long wait is almost over.

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These stoves are so easy to operate, you can take a cat-nap while cooking!
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We also deliver!
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