Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

A tiny house in Tanzania, really most any house not in a city, is what we call "off-grid."  This means exactly what it sounds like.  We live off the electrical grid, the water grid, the sewer grid, the trash pick up grid.  It is vital to do your planning considering this situation. The cats story will be at the bottom but since facebook uses the first picture in the blog I needed to move it up. Windows.   Any house built out of anything other than mud and sticks here (and yes there are still a lot of those being built here) needs to consider how to get air circulating and bringing in light during the day.   Windows are the key to those two concerns.   Tanzanians are also security conscious.   It comes from the belief if you don't guard it or permanently attach it to something, then it is fair game to take.   I even have to watch my laundry while it is drying on the clothesline or the boys herding goats too close to our line will snatch...

Today I want to bring back an issue we have discussed in different ways in the past.  Most notable was a discussion of the electricity usage for the country vs the state of SC during the constant blackouts during last year's hydroelectric plant shut down. So this time let's talk about the specific use of a household in SC.  According to  http://www.electricitylocal.com/states/south-carolina/  the average residential home in SC uses 37.3 kiloWatthours per day.  For those that struggle with the metric system, that is 37300 Watt hours per day. With the contributions by the mission team in September, we have now installed solar powered generated electricity to all of our buildings .  Each major building and several smaller ones have their own power generating stations (not substations) totaling 475 Watts of production.  After taking in efficiency and number of direct sunlight hours I calculate that is 3.6 kiloWatt  hours per day.  So our en...

This last week I got a chance to visit a site where USAID and various charities had put in a solar water pump system in a community.  The system was put in roughly two years ago and quit working several months ago.  I was going to see if I could find out what was wrong with the system.  My expectations on the system were that it would be a fairly simple system with a solar system set up to power a standard pump drawing water from one of the hand dug wells this community has an abundance of.   What I found when I got there was anything but.  It was an expensive, very advanced system that used four solar panels generating over 100 watts each to an electrical box that was connected to a computer chip controlling a sleeve pump that was inside a bored well.  The well was bored to 65 meters.  Feeling inadequate to fix this was an understatement. I did test the things I could and found it was in the control of the pump where the problem was.  ...

Today the first mission team to visit while I have been serving here as a full time missionary boarded the plane home.  From their comments they all had a wonderful time, saw and participated in some amazing things.  Many expressed interest in coming back or staying connected with the ministry in the future.  I hope to recap some of the great things they participated in during this blog since my work with them has kept me from keeping in touch with the folks back home. Saturday: So I had gotten into town Friday afternoon and had some things to take care of before the first team members arrived starting with getting the truck aligned which has been difficult in Singida.  It took several tries to get it aligned and each time we had to take it on a test drive to see if it was any better.  Problem was that we were in the middle of "rush hour" on a road under construction.  Needless to say my nerves were pretty shot by the time we needed to go ...