Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

Last week I taught Barnabas and a Peace Corp Volunteer friend how to set up an extra electric (umeme) outlet in their new residence.  Yes that is my friend Kyle who came to visit at the site.  Fortunately his organization he extended with has provided him with a residence in town near their site and he is starting to get to work on some projects with them.  This unfortunately means he will not be joining the FDM site but it is good for him. So his new residence has one electrical outlet on wall opposite of his bed so he wanted an outlet near his bed.  Most (all affordable) extension cords in town have a short cord typically one meter in length.  We planned to do this work on Sunday because for some Tanzania reason they are shutting off the power in several regions (like shutting off electricity in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia) every Sunday for the next three months.  They are doing this to install or switch over some electrical equipment ...

This week we are looking at adding Solar Power Generation and wiring up the Tiny House. Be forewarned I show my math-yes I qualify for nerdom.  After the video are some photos from the science conference in Singida last weekend.  As I state with all my Tiny House Tanzania videos, I recommend the show Tiny House Nation on the FYI Network with John and Zack as some of my ideas will be coming from that show. The photo above is from making the metal frame for the roof mounted solar panel.  I am drilling a hole for a bolt to attach the panel to the frame.  Some may remember it took 4 minutes to drill a 1/2" auger bit through a 1" piece of wood.  It took an average of 15 minutes to hand drill the bolt hole through a piece of metal 4 mm thick.  About the same length of time the video is this week. Here is Tiny House Tanzania Episode 3-Solar Power link to YouTube video if window below does not work:  https://youtu.be/H9rARQfdzGU One another n...

Ok it appears last week's post was not a big hit except with my core group of supporters. The comments I got were very encouraging but the number of reads was about half the normal. This week I will focus on some basic updates of what is going on. I will start with the biggest update-I finally have a residence permit for Tanzania after only about 6 months of paperwork.  Despite every site online describing the process and telling me it would cost $500, the paperwork came back with a receipt only showing it cost $250.  Now the fun to try and track down a receipt or reimbursement from the government for the other $300 (250 for the actual permit and 50 for the entry fee). What does this mean?  Well first of all I don’t have to go to Nairobi every ninety days anymore.  So I can take trips inside of Tanzania and look around the country a little bit more as well as cut the enormous cost of the Nairobi trips out of my budget going forward.  Those trips cost ar...