23Jan11

23Jan11

Interesting Day, but let’s start with yesterday.

Yesterday was two days in 1.
First, we did work at the school, and were remarkably productive. Wayne is here again, he was on the August trip with me to Ounaminthe. Bruce Carpenter is also here, we did the installation of the solar stuff here in Les Cayes last March.
Overall, we managed to fix a broken underground power line, install new batteries so the inverter was running again, got the water pump running, and that was all in half a day.
Then we left for home, to change and go to Benoit’s wedding. It was sweet to be there for a Haitian wedding. Then, we went to the reception (at MIA’s school), and nearly had a riot there.
Due to a mass of confusion, the reception was at the school, but the batteries had died, and we didn’t have any keys to get to our generator. Then, once I Macgyver’d some power to work, we didn’t have any lightbulbs in the entire school, so we scraped together 2-3 bulbs from other out-buildings.
But, in the end, everything worked out well, and Benoit had a great night.

Then todaY was a more typical work day in Haiti. Spent the whole day putting out fires. lol.
First, had to get the power working again. It had been broken accidentally cause someone wired up the water pump to run on the solar panels, and in doing so managed to really screw things up for me, so none of my power system worked anymore.
Thankfully, it popped a breaker instead of breaking our system. Once I got that sorted out, just ended up balancing power loads all days. We were fixing one of the two generators, plus balancing loads of the water pump and a bunch of high draw power tools and two industrial fans.
Some guys on our team got some real work accomplished. Fixed the diesel generator, got a bunch of laborers started on their agricultural plots, fixed up the water tower stuff (there’s more work to do tomorrow with that, but I have ropes this time).

Things are going well though, and I’m really ADD right now, so this is what you get for an update.
Living the dream.