Shout out to Steven

This is Steven. He has been hanging around the T4T offices, trying to lend a hand with the experiments.

Incinerator Pics

Here the first picture is of the medical waste that is ideally burned. Waste is supposed to be segregated into different categories and then packaged. WIthout this crucial step in waste disposal, there is no way to have any consistency as you burn the waste, and emissions cannot be regulated.



This is a picture of the incinerator chimney during operation. The incinerator is currently burning waste at temperatures over 900 degrees C, and as you can see, there is no smoke! This is exactly what we're looking for.

2nd Day of Testing

So today we did some more testing. We spent the morning discussing how we could most effectively set up our experiment, and decided on what factors we need to analyze. It was a really successful and productive day. Now that we have an gas analyzer to work with, it's really giving us a lot of information to evaluate how effective the incinerator is, and how it can most effectively be operated.

I'm going to try to upload some pictures from the day. They're pretty big so it's going to take up a few posts. Be patient with me.

This is a picture of Nicholas decked out in incineration gear during our tests.

-Stokes

This weekend turned out to be a great deal of fun. On Saturday, as Will wrote, we went to the graduation/turnover ceremony for KiBO. They turned over the items that they bought with the money they raised to a primary school. There were mattresses, roofing materials, and a water filter that Platinum Capitol turned over. As mentioned by Will, I was asked to speak as a "special guest." I was caught off guard. Following Agnes who gave a speech about how it was time for Ugandans to return to a time when doing a good deed was an act of kindness rather than a way to make a profit, I told the group about the Ingram Scholarship program and its emphasis on service I also told the story about Nicholas and the computer being a "tool."

Following the ceremony, Will and I went to lunch with Samali and Agnes and then to visit Agie's friend's grandmother. That evening, we went to Jeremy's home for a lovely dinner and to watch the European Championship in football (soccer). It was a great deal of fun. Jeremy and his wife Jamie are terrific host. Even better, their children kept us entertained and active. We fought with lightsabers, and I was shown how they water the plants aka "what we do to make our parents proud."

Sunday was a relaxing yet productive day. I decided that it was time for me to read the Harry Potter series, which Will brought with him. This was a terrific decision. They are so good. I can't stop reading. I am 240 pages into the Chamber of Secrets! Hopefully, I will be able to finish the whole series before I get home.

Yesterday, I started making appointments with different NGOs to meet about service projects for EAC children to participate in. This morning, I had the first of these appointments with an organization called BeadforLife (http://www.beadforlife.org/). This organization, as I understand it, has three programs. The first program is an 18 month leadership and empowerment program for women. During the first 15 months, women that come from dire circumstances learn to make paper beads. They then sell these beads to BeadforLife who send the jewelery to the US to be sold. Each time a woman sells beads, money is put in an account. The money in this account is for the women to start their own businesses in the last 3 months of the program. I was really impressed with the way that this program gave women the tools to succeed on their own. The second program, I believe, is similar to the first; however, women learn to produce soap rather than beads. Finally, BeadforLife provides funds for children that have dropped out of school to go to vocational school.

When I entered the BeadforLife compound, there was a celebration taking place. Women were dancing and singing traditional songs. I was invited to join. To my embarrassment, I did not have the dance abilities needed to be a successful participant; however, they were very welcoming and only laughed at me once. Witnessing how BeadforLife uses music was surprising and exciting. Because EAC focuses on music and dance, it is great when an organization shares this as it opens up widows for relationships. I can see EAC children using their talents when volunteering with BeadforLife. It is going to be interesting to follow up with the organization in the coming weeks.

Finally, I met an older woman from Boulder that was volunteering with BeadforLife. Last year, she and her husband decided to drop everything and move to Kampala for a few years. Mom and dad . . .

- Feldman

P.S: Go Mavs!!!

First Day of Testing

So today we finally got into the testing of the incinerator. It took quite a bit of patience, but finally at the end of the day we came up with some test results. This morning I came in to the office and realized we had forgotten to charge the analyzer, so we had to wait 3 hours for that to finish, and since the incinerator we were testing hadn't been used in several months, it took a very long time to heat up to required incineration temperatures (700+ degrees C), but after some waiting we finally broke out the new gas analyzer for the first time and ran some tests. After putting so much effort into acquiring an appropriate analyzer, I was pretty nervous that we would get to the testing and something wouldn't work, but to my great relief, everything functioned normally and we got good results. This was just some preliminary testing, and only one category of waste was analyzed, so we haven't really scratched the surface as far as testing goes, but it was still good to see that everything was working normally, and we have a pretty good idea about how we need to go about running the rest of our tests. Nicholas (a different Nicholas than the one mentioned in the last couple of posts) taught me a lot about how the incinerator works, and instructed me on how to run it properly. It really is amazing how well it seems to do it's job for something that seems so plain and simple. Hopefully we'll keep having success as we continue the testing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

- Stokes

They will eat me!

I just wanted to quickly share a pretty funny encounter thatMichael and I had yesterday. After the KiBo graduation , Michael and I went with Agie to visit one of her friend's grandmother (confusing, I know) who lives in a village a little outside of town. She is having some heart problems, so Agie wanted to go check on her, and Michael and I tagged along to keep her company and see a different side of Kampala. After trying to follow some pretty confusing directions, and fifteen minutes of searching for the ever elusive "green gate" we found her house and Agie got to make sure everything was ok with her friend's grandmother. As we were leaving the house we ran into a couple of kids, probably 3 or 4 year-olds, and Michael and I walked up to greet them. As we approached the little girl backed away saying in Luganda, "They will eat me!" We wanted to assure her that there was nothing to be afraid of, so we knelt down and offered out our hands in peace. But, to our great amusement, instead of shaking our hands, she grabbed the little boy standing next to her and pushed him out in front of her as if to check to see if he would get eaten. Only once the little boy had survived his encounter with the "muzungu's" did the little girl approach to shake our hands. Maybe this was one of those things that you had to witness, but Michael and I got quite the kick out of it.

- Stokes

KiBo Graduation

Yesterday Michael and I went to see the KiBo graduation ceremony at St. Mary's Goretti Primary School. As Michael explained in more detail before, KiBo is a program to learn technical job skills while also implementing a service project. This KiBo class had raised over 2,000,000 UGX to buy supplies to fix up St. Mary's, and this ceremony was the official presentation of this gift to the students and teachers of St. Mary's. We were there primarily in support of Nicholas and another EAC girl who were a part of this KiBo class, although Michael got called on to give a quick speech about why he was here in Uganda, and what he was doing with Empower African Children. We were all captivated by his moving words. Anyways, it was a very interesting ceremony of recognizing the class's accomplishments, personal stories of the graduates, and thank you's from the St. Mary's kids. It was really cool to see the idea service and service learning spanning across cultures. KiBo seemed toy stress the idea of using the skills learned through the program to better their communities. For most of the graduates this seemed to be a new idea they first learned through KiBo. It was so cool to see that these graduates, no matter what kind of social condition or standard of living they had come from, had learned the true heart of service which calls them to use whatever skills and resources they have, in particular the new skills they have learned through KiBo, to better lives around them. These students were proud of what they accomplished through their KiBo project and were excited about the opportunity to go out from the program and find places where their new skills could really be put to use. I think we could all take a lesson from these kids, and I felt fortunate to get to witness this special occasion firsthand.

- Stokes