Hello friends,
We're still working hard to prepare for our trip, which is coming up fast! I'll give you a brief update.
On Wednesday night, we met with the education team to eat a delicious dinner, listen to country music, and finish our educational materials. The latter mostly involved cutting and gluing pieces of felt for our water cycle lesson. Here we all are (minus Andy):
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The education team has put together several lesson plans that are fun for kids of different ages. These include lessons in the water cycle, water and energy conservation, filtering water, watersheds, nutrition, and others. They've been preparing fun activities to go with these lessons and teaching the travel team how to teach the lessons.
On Thursday, Andy and I went to Denver to meet with some members of OZ Architecture and Tetra Tech who helped create the city of Kigali master plan a few years ago. These guys knew the city like the back of their hands and gave us a ton of great information and contacts. We chatted for a couple of hours about how to create community, the status of the water and wastewater treatment infrastructure, who to contact for geotechnical services, the feasibility of using biogas, and much more.
Later that day, we met up with BJ to practice our cookstove testing for the CVK portion of the trip. When we were there in January, we noticed that the cookstoves that are used most frequently were deteriorating rather dramatically... Not all of the cooks and kids use the stoves properly, which also leads to damage. One of our goals on this trip is to do a few tests on the stoves and compare the results with those done on the new stoves when they were first installed. BJ has been heading up this part of the maintenance by getting the protocols for the tests, buying all of the materials, and coordinating with the lab to get practice materials.
The boiling tests involved timing how long it takes to boil a pot of water, and weighing fuel before and after the test--luckily we had some heavy-duty fireproof gloves to beat out the fire from the wood before weighing the pieces.
We're still working hard to prepare for our trip, which is coming up fast! I'll give you a brief update.
On Wednesday night, we met with the education team to eat a delicious dinner, listen to country music, and finish our educational materials. The latter mostly involved cutting and gluing pieces of felt for our water cycle lesson. Here we all are (minus Andy):
.JPG)
On Thursday, Andy and I went to Denver to meet with some members of OZ Architecture and Tetra Tech who helped create the city of Kigali master plan a few years ago. These guys knew the city like the back of their hands and gave us a ton of great information and contacts. We chatted for a couple of hours about how to create community, the status of the water and wastewater treatment infrastructure, who to contact for geotechnical services, the feasibility of using biogas, and much more.
Later that day, we met up with BJ to practice our cookstove testing for the CVK portion of the trip. When we were there in January, we noticed that the cookstoves that are used most frequently were deteriorating rather dramatically... Not all of the cooks and kids use the stoves properly, which also leads to damage. One of our goals on this trip is to do a few tests on the stoves and compare the results with those done on the new stoves when they were first installed. BJ has been heading up this part of the maintenance by getting the protocols for the tests, buying all of the materials, and coordinating with the lab to get practice materials.
The boiling tests involved timing how long it takes to boil a pot of water, and weighing fuel before and after the test--luckily we had some heavy-duty fireproof gloves to beat out the fire from the wood before weighing the pieces.
Andy took notes while I tried to keep the fire going. Tobi the happy doggie is in the background.
We finished the day with a meeting at Boulder Cafe with one of our mentors, Mark Cormier. Mark's day job involves designing schools for Colorado, so he's excited to help us as much as possible when we get back in August and begin finalizing the design of the school for the ROP.
Yesterday, after a travel card fiasco that involved a lot of frantic phone calls and running around Denver, the whole travel team met for another dinner (we eat a lot!) and to distribute all of our gear. With the camera equipment, stuff for friends in Rwanda, maintenance and education materials, we have a lot to bring on this trip!
Just a few more tasks remain, and then we'll be off! We'll write again from Kigali, where we're all arriving at different times.
Stay in touch!!
Sonya
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