Just back from a week on the road with the
solar team. We travelled first to Moyamba and then on to Bo, Salones second
city, and finally over the Moa River to the Liberian border installing solar
panels in hospitals and community health centres. The communities were very
excited at the prospect of light in the evening and many people gathered to
watch the team do their magic, including the village chief and gaggles of
excited kids. It’s difficult to believe that these villages have survived for
so long with only open fires and kerosene lamps for light especially
considering it gets dark by 7pm all year round. The team are extremely well
trained, Kamada the boss having travelled to India with the organisations
director Idriss, to learn solar engineering from Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College
some years ago. Since then Safer Future has been providing free training to
young people interested in learning the trade. These young people are then able
to gain employment by either getting jobs as solar engineers or continuing work
with Safer Future on government funded contracts to install solar in remote
areas. Unfortunately, due to lack of funds this year’s training will not be
able to take place.
It’s has been really great to get out of
the office and into the field to see the projects working, see the effects they
are having on the communities involved and see the quality of work being performed
by the engineers.
The idea of giving people who have been in
darkness until now access to light is still a tough one to grasp but there
really is still such a long way to go. Even in the capital many people don’t
have electricity, use the polluted rivers to wash in, and almost everyone still
cooks on open fire, fuelled by the quickly diminishing rain forests.
Andi our in house chemist is currently
trying to set up a bio fuel project on the farm to create ethanol based fuel
for use in stoves, motorbikes and other farm equipment. This will be a
relatively inexpensive and sustainable project as after it has been set-up all
that is needed to maintain it is bio-waste…..stay tuned.
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