Solar Bulbs

So i had great intentions of updating this blog a little each day, but I never seemed to be able to get my hands on an ipad while we were up there. So this is all posted after the fact. And then I thought that it would be easy to put photos that I took with the iPad into the blog that I was writing using the iPad - but I was soooo wrong. So there has been a lot of searching, a steep learning curve, and a few apps downloaded in the attempt to get this to work. This is my first attempt, so we'll see how it goes....

The first project that we worked on in Nangi was installing solar bulbs, which Brad and I learned to do in Manila. Here are pics of the teachers learning to make the bulbs:

After making the bulbs, we let them dry overnight and then installed four of them to start. Here are some installation pics:

This is Brad showing Chandra how to fill them. We used half water and half cheap vodka to keep the bottles from freezing in the winter. We also added a little bleach to keep it clear.

That's the vodka... The villagers also make something called Raksi - it's basically a homemade millet (grain) alcohol, and they said that they might use that instead of vodka.

Climbing up on the roof is a little sketchy...

The first one went into the teachers' bathroom. Even on a cloudy day it lit the small room up.

The next one went into a girls' student hut. The picture above shows the bulb just to the right of the beam after it is installed.

Here is Chandra installing one on a boys' hut. He had the hang of it by the end of the day, so now he can do more and teach some students how to do it.

The last bulb went into a storeroom roof, but I didn't get any pics of that one.