Back in the saddle, such as it is.

Phew.

After having been thoroughly destabilized for a couple of weeks, and then after having scrambled to catch up, I am back in the saddle, such as it is. My cough is back to its normal dust-and-smog clearing and my mind has found some sort of balance.

Hereunder I catch up a little on the situation reports.

While I was sick I took a day on-work and accepted an invitation from the Mali Folke Center for Renewable Energy (MFC) to come see a village 60km outside of Bamako that will eventually be home to one of their ‘centers of excellence’ a place where techniques and technologies will be taught and shared for the economic, environmental and social benefit of the surrounding villages.

MFC organized the National Forum on the Environment from a few weeks ago. At the Forum I met the director of MFC, and we clicked pretty harmoniously. I met with him a couple weeks afterwards and we determined that we have the same vision and that we must work together, so he set up the trip to the village.

I went, saw things of interest, and then continued being sick. They asked me asked me to get the ball rolling by writing up some initial thoughts and cost estimates on a project which they want to hire me to pull off. They want to empower women and farmers through decentralized, low tech solar thermal. They want mango farmers, onion farmers, tomato farmers et al. to have access to crop dehydrators which would allow them to conserve their produce and sell it off-peak season (in some cases half of the seasons crop goes to waste due to overabundance in-season and the inability to conserve it).

They also want a series of technologies which will serve the needs of Shea nut growers, who produce Shea nut butter, which has a number of nutritional and cosmetic benifits. The nuts need to be boiled, then dried, then heated and mashed. Here they are being boiled:

The difficulty is that the Shea nut season coincides with the rainy season, and so unless they have concentrated solar energy, they often have trouble properly drying the nuts, since they leave them out to dry and before they are dry the rain comes along. Additionally, smoke sometimes lowers the quality of the product, and the women have to spend hours a day hunting for wood or spend thousands of francs a week on wood.

I have just recently submitted my documents to MFC and hope to have an answer soon.

Soon to be blug: thoughts on crop dehydrators, agricultural economics in Mali, advances and specs of the butterfly, my new pad and hopefully, the MFC

p.s. due to some class-A bungling I lost the pictures for the last couple of weeks. L