Waiting for Solar Power

This is a tiny photo I took with my phone camera of Oren and David on the merry-go-round at Club du Lac Tanganyika.



I can’t believe another week just went by. I am definitely going to say less this week because I was very negligent about taking my camera with me, so consequently I don’t have a lot of photos to show. I confess I did forget it on a week when there were at least a few photo-ops that I missed. I will try to keep it closer at hand next week, which is also quite full.

One of the photo ops I definitely missed was Oren learning to dive. That is, jump head-first off the side of the pool. He has really been increasing in confidence at swimming in the pool. He loves to swim and goes in the shallow pool without water wings. Last week during a day when I had both kids, I convinced him that he should try jumping off the edge of the pool. He was very timid at first, but as he understood it better, he did so readily. I did not prompt him to go in headfirst, but he began trying it and seemed to feel OK about it. Yesterday while we were there he discovered he could do ‘cannonballs’ and get daddy soaking wet. He enjoyed doing that Saturday afternoon.

The week went pretty normally as far as our routine, interrupted only by Oren being sick on Monday and staying home from school, and a jour congé (holiday) on Wednesday. It was a day of memorial for the assassination of one of Burundi’s Presidents (There are several of these holidays in October.) We all took that day off and went swimming as a family in the morning at the place where Rebecca and I swim before work. It is called Entente Sportif and seems to be a colonial relic, dating back to the 60s at least, which although it is not kept up, has some charm to it in that appears to have been built at a time when Burundi was imagining a bold new future for itself. The pool itself is enormous, has two kids pools, lovely grounds and an enormous patio restaurant (now defunct) abutting one entire side of the pool. I can’t imagine such a facility being built at any time in the near future. I think the nation is still very traumatized by the intervening years of war and not nearly so optimistic. Ironically, the pool borders the former Presidential palace where the president whose memorial day we were celebrated was assassinated along with many dignitaries and members of his party. It does not appear that anything has been done to those grounds since that time either.

We did have one guest week. A Nigerian man named Gopar, the MCC regional peace officer, who had been teaching at the large peace training seminar (GLPS) taking place this month in Gitega. He stayed with us on Thursday and Friday after his teaching was done and I took him to the airport very late at night on Friday. We had an opportunity to brief him on the election situation here and talked about a strategy to coordinate the activities of our partners around election sensitization strategies. It is clear that much is at stake regarding these elections and whether Burundi will successfully be able to remain stable through the process.

The other interesting thing that has happened this week was the installation of a solar panel on our roof. We have been needing to address the problem of power outages I have been writing about ad nauseum. Many have turned to generators, but solar power is another option and Zachee had a panel and battery installed in house and is now able to supplement all of his power needs with it, even when they do not have electricity for 5 or 6 days. We had the same thing installed at our house, and it has unfortunately not begun to work yet because of some glitches in the system, but I am hopeful that they will be worked out by Monday. At this writing I am still in the dark.

It is interesting to find alternative energy like solar so readily available here. The whole set up cost us about $1000 for one panel, an inverter and a 200 hour battery and should be able to power our lights (not refrigerator) indefinitely. Coming from the US, where there is almost always power available from the grid, it is hard to imagine generating my own power in such an efficient way. Solar power always sounded so exotic to me, but here, it is a far better alternative to a noisy, expensive generator. (Hopefully it will be working properly in the next day or so.)

I have one last anecdote, a bit of good news that I want to think of as an act of God, but it could just be good luck. At church this morning, while we were sitting in the service, I needed to get something for David out of the baby backpack. I reached deep into the bottom and to my great surprise…pulled out my ipod!! We had thought this had been in the car during the break-in a couple weeks ago. I don’t know when it was put in the pack, but we were very glad to find that that was not among the items stolen at that time.

Next week is a travel week. I will be going up to Gitega for the closing ceremony of GLPS and then Rebecca and I will head to Rwanda on Sunday afternoon with the kids. We are also going to be doing a lot of work to get ready for a team retreat the week after next.

With that said, I am going to sign off early this week. We are having a lot of trouble with the internet as well, so hopefully it went up on time.

Oren and Timmy on the merry-go-round as well. I'll do better with photos next week, I promise.