Le Blog en Francais... encore!

L'autre address etait un solution temporaire. Les blogs sont maintenant disponible a

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de http://sun.solarfire.org/

ou, plus simplement: http://sun.solarfire.org/articles/spip.php?rubrique18

Merci Olivier!

The National Forum on the Environment

Right. Remember what I said about blog frequency and craziness? Yeah.

So Monday rolled around, and there was no action on the budget. Not only that, but the guy who was supposed to help bring the Helios to CNESOLER didn't show up. I decided to go to the director of AMADER's home energy dept to speed things up. He understood, but couldn't influence things. I told him about my decisions regarding CNESOLER and he agreed that it would improve chances to get funding if I partner with a government establishment.

I went home without having accomplished much.

Tuesday started out the same… I was in an office trying to move things along when a brochure on the lady's desk caught my eye. The Mali-Folkecenter is apparently hosting the National Forum on the Environment. MFC is a pretty big operation, and I hadn't yet made contact with them, though it was in the plan. It didn't really connect just yet that I am in Mali. I look at the date, it says 29th of Jan 2008, not knowing what date it is I think for a moment, that's a shame that I missed it. Wait a minute… that's TODAY! At this point I still have significant doubts that we'd be able to do the necessary paperwork to get a vehicle, or register me or whatnot. Still, might as well ask.

Bam. To the directors office! 4 hours later we had dis-assembled the machine and transported it to the Palace of Culture, where the Forum was taking place. They gave me 10,000 F CFA to buy food to cook for people and I was on my way.

The next day we(and by we I mean she) cooked up a big stew for everyone.
Solar Fire Style: maxed out thermometer (that means +200C)
Ibrahim C Tomota says: Solar Fire, awww yeah.
So much stew.
lol poor SK-14, all broken and neglected:
Then there's the Association of Women Engineers who had a stand promoting their use of cardboard and tinfoil cookers with a heat resistant bag. They have to be imported from Holland, but have the advantage of being able to be transported like 30 to a backpack.
Mmmm so much solar cake. We made the mistake of using pots that were too big for cake, and they were burning at the edges and not done in the middle, so we massacred it a little bit and put everything on the baking trays.
I probably served cake to like 100 people.


It was good to the last crumb.
Haha in our enthusiasm for cake we let the focal point wander… on this oven we built the exterior side walls out of wood to save on tinsmithing, but we'll probably not do that in the future, considering it smolders a little if the focal point hits the tin on front.
I made tons of good contacts, met the minister of the environment a couple more times, and impressed the people who work at CNESOLER (I was hosted by their stand at the forum). Everyone is really enthusiastic, so we'll see what we can cook up.

This weekend is catch up on sleep time and kit maintenance. This coming week, if the money isn't available to start the papillon prototype I'm just going to buy enough materials to get started... the Habitat Salon is less than 3 weeks away, and is important enough to disregard protocol (what? me? disregard protocol?)

CNESOLER

The National Center for Solar and Renewable Energies.

May I present to you the chief of the workshop:
he's showing off a big parabolic cooker which is something like 4 years old and is already worn to the point of ineffectiveness. Such is the story of tinfoil contraptions. They were trying to get around the need to import polished aluminium from Germany and so they experimented with a variety of foils.

Solar cookers (box and parabolic) and solar dehydrators (active and passive). They dehydrate onions in the dehydrators, but the cookers only ever come out for experimentation.



Having developed something of a cough due to constant sand and smog inhalation I've decided I'm not going to take it anymore:



GEAR! Like, real measuring equipment! Golly, you mean I get to be scientific and stuff?



Things at CNESOLER look pretty good.

Re-strategification

I just learned something that blew my mind. The National Center for Solar Energy Research and Renewable Energies doesn’t receive any research funding. Meanwhile, Mali is party to the following environmental treaties: Ozone Layer Protection, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Biodiversity and Desertification. The current listed environmental problems include: deforestation; soil erosion; desertification; inadequate supplies of potable water… All of which low tech solar thermal can play a large role in combating!

Re-strategification: apply all cunning to ensure CNESOLER gets funding.

Right now they’ve got a decent workshop and a lot of experienced personnel sitting around with not enough to keep them busy. Once I learned this I went straight to the director. I asked him how could it be and he spread his hands, gave an exasperated sigh and shook his head. I told him my new plan was to get the center funded to research Solar Fire. He liked what he heard. If anyone knows of an organization that could possibly be interested in funding the Malian National Center for Solar Energy and Renewable Energy send me some info1!

I’ve sent a budget estimate for prototyping the domestic cooker (I’m planning a variation on the Papillon solar concentrator, seen below, which is an excellent design, but some elements need to be imported. My modifications should make it locally producible and therefore a candidate for auto-diffusal).

Unfortunately I did this on Thursday, when the weekend starts on Friday and work doesn’t resume until Monday. After that we’ve got to follow protocol, but the director of CNESOLER agrees that we’ll be at AMADER’s heels.

I’ll use this weekend to try and get in touch with the ministers. My plan is to propose that while the training center gets built and equipped, we take advantage of existing infrastructure to get a jump start on R&D.

I’m also communicating as much as possible. First entry in the Tacticus is “communicate”. As such, I’m going to try and connect as many dots as I can. I’ve gone through the Solar Cookers Internation contact database for Mali and Burkina Faso, because those are the two countries in Africa where Solar Fire is active.

“Burkina Faso?” you might be saying. That’s right. After the expo went out on continental television a number of people got in touch who want to bring Solar Fire to Burkina. As such, I’m putting them in contact with one another and the active solar elements in BF, and hopefully together we can formulate a game plan. Note: they’ll be doing it with only over-the-net support, as I can’t go support them in person… if anyone is available to go to Burkina Faso and wants to help, we can get you trained up either in Europe, or in Mali and you can be on your way.

Chess, Life and Strategy

I should have studied at Josh Waitzkin’s Academy (Chessmaster 10) longer and harder. But I didn’t, I was too busy GOing in Cuba, GOing in France, and then GOing to Africa.

Things didn’t change too much when I got to Mali. I set myself on ‘linear GO mode’ (while building the Helios) to such a degree that once the objective (demonstrating/awareness raising) was completed I didn’t re-evaluate my line (being exhausted also diminished my analytical capacities).

Before the demo I had recognized the inefficiency of attempting to predict events after the demo, since so much would change, and so for mental convenience I settled on a simple line which was fairly obvious and low energy (meeting the ministers, gauging their enthusiasm to finance).

In Waitzkin’s Academy he teaches the necessity of recognizing what your opponent leaves behind when he moves. In life the opponent is reality (remove any negative connotation associated with the word opponent) and I failed to fully recognize what new opportunities emerged after the demo happened (reality moved).

This is because I pulled the noob mistake of not analyzing the new possibilities as fully as I could have (true I was physically exhausted and sleep deprived) and instead continued by following through with a line simply because I had set up for it.

Less abstractly:

Karim, Tomota, Lalla, myself and others conceived a goal: create a non-profit association dedicated to Solar Fire, and pursue the agencies able to supply the means to attain the goal Solar Fire International which is to promote ecological energy autonomy by creating a Research, Development and Training facility.

Lalla and Tomota are particularly insistent that all negotiations and efforts go through the association. They cite examples of government inefficiency and argue that the autonomy of being an independent organization will save us from getting mired in bureaucracy. These thoughts and their implications formed the basis of the line I was working on, which was linear towards getting a research, development and training center operational (the goal of promoting ecological energy independence is not compatible with GO mode, as it is an abstract guide for action).

The government agents were very impressed by the demonstration, but no meetings have happened to date. This is primarily because they have been out of the country, as the president has been on the road. Nobody’s fault, but not the speed and action on the project I would have liked to see.

Being stuck in linear mode for four or five days after the expo, I did little things to prepare for the eventual meetings: price materials, build a mental workshop and make lists of tools, personnel, space requirements etc.

I had vague feeling of inefficiency, but couldn’t see past the blinders GO mode.

Impatient, I figured I might as well see what AMADER (Malian Agency for Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification) was like. They approached me after the demo and told me that there was a Habitat Salon (SAHABA 2008) going on in Feb. and that if I could make a domestic model before then I could do an exhibition with them.

I got the go ahead to visit them. I did, and it turns out they are situated right beside the National Center for Solar and Renewable Energy. Within two hours I was touring the workshops with the directors of both AMADER and CNESOLER making a plan to create a partnership between our three organizations (AMADER supplies funding, CNESOLER supplies tools/workers and Tasuma Tile (Bambara for Solar Fire) supplies me. It was not official, AMADER still has to clear things with the president-director general, but they were pretty pumped and moving with a sense of urgency, since SAHABA 2008 is only a month away.

Pumped that the manpower and tools already exist for all the research and development I could want to do in the short term already exist, I fill Tomota and Lalla in on what went down. Their reaction was something along the lines of ‘ok Tasuma Tile will work with them for the domestic model since it is urgent and we don’t have the facilities to do it yet, but after that it’s back to Tasuma Tile running the solar show.’ I reiterated that I would work with whoever it was most efficient to work with. It was slightly tense.

That night I read a document that Eerik had sent to me. It was a breakdown of his strategy and a criticism of mine. The linear GO mode spell was broken, hopefully for the last time. It was refreshing like ice cold coconut milk (which is super refreshing and also nourishing).

Unconventional times, unconventional tactics.

Le blog en Français!

http://www.solarfire.org/operations/mali/context_fr.html

Merci a Olivier pour son traduction!

pwned?

The day of the exposition has come. We've hyped this thing pretty hard, and now we'll see if we can pull it off. Our tests yesterday gave us some information about how the heating of the oven was uneven, so I had to make some final adjustments:
Normally, we'd have another day of tests to verify that the heat distribution is good, but we're out of time... the sound crews and cameras start setting up (the man with the camera is a Frenchman who lives in Bamako, and who lives nearby the workshop and offered his services and his high definition camera to film the exposition):Everything is in place.
The sky is blue.
The oven is hot (+250C).
All we need now are some guests:
Here they come! And in style no less.
The minister of the promotion of the woman, child and family and the minister of the environment, along with representants of 4 other ministers settle in:
At this point I hand off my camera to Yusuf so that he can take pictures while I'm shaking hands, giving a speech, and participating in the event. Unfortunately, he mistook the zoom function for the shutter button and I have no photos of the rest of the event. :(

RV managed to take a pic of me speaking:
And the attentive audience:


Don't despair! We've got high definition footage of the whole ceremony, so Olivier and I are going to put together a little montage which I'll post as soon as I have it.

Regardless of that unfortunate mixup, it went superbly. The bread was baked to perfection, the guests were impressed, the ministers pledged their support and afterwards amid all the handshaking and networking I was told about several workshops that could be put at my disposition.

The minister of the woman, child and family put the facilities of the Kid City at the service of the Solar Fire Project. I'll be moving in soon, and any project-mates who join me can do the same.

Tomorrow, I have been invited to check out the workshop run by Amader, which stands for Malian Agency for the Development of Renewable Energy.

Before Karim leaves this Friday the two ministers will receive us to flesh out the plan.

The plan being create a research and development facility which will develop a number of low tech, low cost, high effectiveness solar technologies which we will then attempt to diffuse as broadly as possible.