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.
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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.

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.

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.

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.

As a side trip, in between trainings, I visited Mawlamyine, a decaying southern port city and another of Orwell's old haunts. In fact, his family had lived there for a couple of generations, long before his own arrival. I went to visit my friends in the Mon Women's Organization to discuss what we could set up in the way of trainings for next year. It was good fun to meet up with my old friends that I had first met during a solar training in 2008 in Sangklaburi. As always, the food was great chez the Mon ladies, but the highlight of the trip was a visit to the island just across the river – the ominously named “Ogre Island”.

As it turned out, Ogre Island is a wonderful place. Partly due to the fact of being an island, Mon village culture is still widely preserved. The houses are built close together, with constant visiting through doors that are only closed when everyone goes to sleep. It's one of the most peaceful and relazed places I've ever been. That's not to say that the people are just lazing around, chatting the day away. I was taken to see, (as I suspect, most visitors are), a family-owned rubber band factory and a woodworkers' shop that exports to other SE Asian countries. As an extra treat, I was taken to an ice making machine that is driven by a diesel engine, with producer gas from a rice husk gasifier added for fuel savings. Funky doesn't even begin to describe it. I was thrilled!

The land is flat and fertile, and were it not for the fierce heat and stratospheric humidity, Ogre Island would be high on my list of places to retire to, (whenever that will be!).

Soon after arrival in Yangon I was put in touch with Father Benjamin, a Karen priest who runs the Ayerwaddy Homeland project near Myaungmya.  Luckily, he happened to be visiting Yangon, so we were able to meet and we hit it off straight away. Father Benjamin, who stayed for 6 years in France, training and serving his French host community, is a man of keen perception and great awareness of the risks and potentialities facing his small Karen community of 300 souls.

Maungmya is located in the northwestern part of the Ayerwaddy Delta and is a very pleasant small regional market town and administrative center. I've been re-reading “Finding George Orwell in Burma” by Emma Larkin and coincidentally, Orwell was posted to Myaungmya for several months in the 1920s. The town still retains many old colonial era buildings and a relaxed back-water atmosphere.

Father Benjamin started the Ayerwaddy Homeland project over twenty years ago and it's main goal is to provide community livliehood and education while conserving the traditional rural lifestyle through sustainable agriculture. This is a noble task and Father Benjamin is deeply committed to helping his community be as self-sufficient as possible. I visited both the community living in the forest and the hostels for students in Myaungmya and the nearby large port city of Pathein.

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!

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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!

​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.

​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

​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.

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.

​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.

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. ​

​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.

​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.

​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.

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.

​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.

Well, my second trip to the borderlands has just drawn to a close. After a very shaky start, I finally settled in, making friends and work contacts and now I am leaving with a great sense of accomplishment. I will return in January 2010 and I expect to have many new projects to work on.
My Projects
The last month has been a blur of activity, much of it bucketing about in four-wheel drive trucks!  One of the most rewarding undertakings was the training of my assistant Tun Ein. He’s a 24 year-old Burmese refugee who already had some electrical and electronic experience. I was able to pay him while teaching him the essentials of solar installation and maintenance. Luckily, we were able to do three installations together and I feel that Tun Ein will be a big help in the future. First we went back to Ti Lai Pa, which I had visited earlier during the dry season. On that occasion, the journey was a very bumpy 4-hour truck ride, mainly criss-crossing a river bed. This time it was an 8-hour slalom over slippery rivers of mud that used to be roads!  Between the three trucks in the convoy, we got stuck more than twenty times. However, it was all worth it as the new clinic is a substantial hardwood structure with a metal roof, the installation easy and the meals provided by our very grateful Karen hosts were unforgettable. Next we did two installations for the Mon National Health Committee. The first one was in Halokhanee camp for internally displaced persons, just inside Burma. This time I had permission from the Thai authorities and the camp was only two hours from Sangkhla, along a surprisingly smooth dirt road. This camp differs from others I have visited inside Thailand, in that it is more permanent and feels more like a village than a refugee camp. However, the reality is the same. The inhabitants are stuck there, with no prospect of returning to their villages of origin. Again the hospitality was memorable and the fish paste probably the best I have ever tasted! Lastly, we did a system at the Mon clinic at Japanese Well, again just inside Burma. They already have an over-sized generator there, but it is ancient and it has an insatiable appetite for diesel. One innovation we employed in the two Mon clinics was to use 3Watt LED lights in the In-Patient Department and the bathroom. These use so little energy that we can leave them on all night.
Another small job was to re-install the solar array and rework the battery configuration on a 500W solar system belonging to Children of the Forest, children’s home. The system had largely been donated by Annex Power, a Bangkok solar supplier.  Some rather basic mistakes had been made and when I diplomatically pointed these out to Annex, they invited me to come to Bangkok to give a short training to their engineers. It was fun to meet them and get a sense  of the commercial solar scene in another country and I look forward to doing business with them in the future.
One promise I had to make good on was to repair some electrical conduit and wiring at Baan Dada’s. This is a children’s home near Huaymalai, run by Richard, a smiling  Filipino man, with over fourteen years of service on the border under his belt. It was extremely satisfying to tear out the hideous attempt at conduit we found, and replace it with some fine looking pipe. Tun Ein was instructed in the joys of taking pride in one’s work and installing conduit that one could actually pull some wire into!
NawPawlulu
Due to donor cut-backs, Pawlulu is searching for other sources of income. I helped her complete the application for a grant from the Japanese government to set up a sewing project for her patients and local villagers. I hope she gets it. I got the final accounting from Nandoe for the funds I had supplied back in December. The results are impressive. The chicken coup was completed and stocked with eight chickens. The two fish ponds were completed and stocked with one thousand catfish and tilapia. The shop front was completed and is now the smartest boutique in town! The patients all got sandals, blankets, mosquito nets and pillows. And there is $100 left over for future projects. My relationship with Pawlulu and Nandoe was  one of the cherished experiences I take away from this place. I am also taking away a huge stock of hand woven sarongs, bags, cushion covers and scarfs, which I will sell at my fundraising events in early winter.
Whispering Seed
I donated a small solar water pump to the project and paid for most of the construction of a hand dug well to put it on. The rainy season has started and Jim has to worry about getting all his kids and their possessions back into Sangkhla before the flooding river cuts them off. I think the well digging will have wait till next year. Hopefully, by then he will have funding for the large solar system we have been planning.
Next Year
I plan to return in January and continue spreading the solar gospel. In addition to Jim’s  system, I hope to work on a large system for the Mercy Team clinic at Japanese Well. Maybe power a safe house for single mothers there also. Solar hot water, solar cooking and solar food drying are also in my sights