The Beacon Solar Energy Project for Sierra Leone

While we potentially still have a readership (although probably far reduced from our high of 197 unique viewers last week) and I have this soapbox, I wanted to share this blog post by NYTimes columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Nick Kristof is an award-winning journalist known for his op-eds covering humanitarian crises around the globe. He’s one of my heroes, for his ability to bring some of the most pressing and under-reported human rights issues to the attention of the American public, and I “blame” him in large part for my humanitarian wanderlust. If not for a high school history class assignment to read the New York Times every day, I don’t know when I would have learned about the crisis in Darfur or sex trafficking in Cambodia or just the average life of the typical citizen of the globe who lives on less than $2 a day. Anyway, back to my main point…

Kristof published this blog post right before we left, in which he discusses some criticisms of his writings as portraying Westerners in a sort of “knights on white horses” role to Africans who are helpless in their dire needs. Check it out here:

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/westerners-on-white-horses/

In the short post, he explores a few issues that I think are very relevant to our project. One is the extraordinary work being done by Sierra Leoneans – like Dr. Barrie and everyone who works at NOW. Or the rising stars of EFO, like Jalloh, Suma, and Idrissa, students who have the technical expertise to bring electricity to all parts of Sierra Leone. Or even entrepreneurial Uncle Ben and his guest house, which is undergoing construction for expansion and providing pretty much the only secure, clean, and safe lodging for visitors to Kono. Another issue is the portrayal of Africa – I think sometimes we were frustrated with the pace of progress, or the corruption that was accepted as the norm, or the vast number of needs we witnessed. Yet I hope that we also portrayed a picture of Sierra Leone that highlighted the rich culture and incredible people and signs of hope for the future. A third issue is the Westerners – we did show up with solar panels and funding, and although I would have been sad to not have been able to visit Sierra Leone again, the project could have happened without our physical presence in the country. However, sending the four of us was not only a great learning experience for ourselves, but we were in a sense the “bridge characters” that Kristof talks about. Would we have reached as many people as we did with the story of GAF/NOW’s great healthcare work and EFO’s steps to light the country if the Beacon Solar Energy Project for Sierra Leone (that’s us) didn’t keep a blog?

Hopefully the benefits of this project extend far beyond the community of Koidu. Maybe someone out there was looking for a worthy cause and has since contacted or become involved with GAF/NOW or EFO. Or maybe everyone is just a little more knowledgeable about Sierra Leone or solar panels or international development (a topic that I sometimes think is harder than thermodynamics). I hope through our blogging, we joined people like Nick Kristof in raising awareness of both the needs and the success stories in places like Sierra Leone.

-Meghan

After a ten hour ride on a leaky, squeaky government bus, Henry and I arrived in Freetown last night. We checked into the Diana II Guesthouse, a small  5 room guesthouse advertised in the guidebook as having hot water and mango trees (neither of which are true), but it sure is a nice change of place from Sierra International Hotel since we are outside the noise and bustle of downtown Freetown. We were supposed to have dinner with Dr. Barrie last night, but alas our deliquent phone failed us yet again. We’ve been unable to receive or make calls, or receive text messages. Needless to say, we’ll make sure to get a better one next year. Today we’ll be visiting the Freetown Library that is run by the Sierra Leone Library Board as well as the American Library to continue our research and assessment for a potential project with the Kono Library next year. Hopefully we’ll be able to find out more about how they are organized and run, as well as how the Library Board oversees all of its branches.  Apart from that, we have some time to explore the more touristy area around here–hoping to hit up some arts and crafts markets and, weather permitting, Lumley Beach. Tomorrow, we’ll be taking the last ferry to the airport (and hopefully catch the sunset over the water!), and chill until our flight departs for Casablanca at around 3:30am. Currently, the possible sources of amusement include playing endless hours of Egyptian Ratscrew, playing a ghetto soccer game on Henry’s laptop, and reviving our conversation with Francis, a geography enthusiast who hangs around the airport. We’ll probably stop at an internet cafe again tomorrow before we leave but if not, see everyone back in the US! [A more reflective post on the trip to come; my precious minutes on the internet are coming to an end right now.]

-Zoe

I’m not quite sure which Greek god is in charge of airline travel these days, but I’d like to find out how to pay homage to him/her relatively soon. Whether it’s from Mt. Olympus, the heavens, or karmic forces, I’ve got to say that my travel luck is well…. crappy and not getting any better.

During the last couple of days, I have spent 38 hours traveling from Freetown to San Francisco. During that time, every single one of my three airline flights has been late. I am also 0/2 for checked luggage retrieval during this trip. Yep…. Royal Air Maroc lost my luggage not only to Freetown, but now also back from Freetown. Due to these delays, I have also been the last passenger to board a connecting flight twice during this trip, sprinting through terminals in order to barely catch transfers from JFK to CMN and JFK to SFO. Well… I guess at least I can say that the process of traveling for me is never boring.

Anyways, it’s good to be home, and I’m not too worried about the luggage. I’m assuming it’ll show up one of these days, and now that I’m home, I’ll have more than enough spare clothing to wear. Perhaps all of this travel misfortune is just to offset the relative smoothness of our project implementation in Sierra Leone. If that’s the case, then there’s no doubt that some close-calls on transfers and lost baggage are more than worth the inconvenience.

I second Meghan’s post from yesterday. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to have seen this whole project through. It was really touching to be able to have created, designed, and shaped our own project from start to finish. I think we are all so lucky to have had the support that we’ve received from Princeton, without which none of this would have been possible.

But I also hope that this project is not seen as a fully satisfactory endpoint. In a country like Sierra Leone, which still has some of the worst health and economic statistics, there is always so much more to be done. A solar panel system provides power, but only with the proper management and usage of this resource will it have the most impact. The NOW clinic will be using the electricity to power their new medical equipment, and we are also hoping that the lights might now be able to help enable the clinic to extend their hours of operation. We hope to monitor how the solar system is functioning in the upcoming months as well as the impacts it has on the clinic. The range of issues concerning the impact of our system resonate deeper still and are interlaced with the effectiveness of NOW’s efforts to reform the healthcare system in Sierra Leone. There are many layers of complex relationships that exist between the NOW clinic and the government, and it is our hope that the success of the clinic will help provide an example that will inspire change in the Sierra Leone healthcare system.

Meghan and I would like the Princeton relationship with Sierra Leone to continue after this project. I’m sure that Henry and Zoe are doing their best to assess for other potential ways in which Princeton students may be able to contribute in the future. Meghan and I have agreed that in our post-Princeton lives (yes, although hard to fathom right now, I’ve been told that there is life beyond Princeton) we plan on returning to the clinic again. Maybe we’ll have learned something useful from grad/medical school.

Until then, we wish everyone who is or may be involved in the future with the NOW/GAF clinic’s efforts the best of luck.

Below are some pictures from all of our cameras.

-Neal

For our last week here in Kono, Henry and I have three main goals: to paint a mural, set up an Open Medical Record System, and assess for a new project. After building a small room to house the batteries and other solar equipment, we were left with a large, drab, brown wall in the waiting area simply begging for some aesthetic relief. Being the artsy type that I am, I jumped at the idea of painting a mural. After acquiring five bottles of paint, four brushes, and a gallon of kerosene (the standard here instead of paint thinner), I started on an underwater scene for the wall. We threw around ideas for the mural that ranged from Akon to the First Family (both are huge superstars here) but we finally settled on an underwater theme with a submarine with our faces looking out the windows. Taking a cue from the Beatles, I graced our underwater scene with a large yellow submarine with nine windows-four for us EWBers, four for the Princeton interns working with the Global Action Foundation, and one large one to be shared by Dr. Barrie and Dan Kelly. Currently, I have our eight faces up on the wall with cheesy grins. The paint is difficult to work with so painting faces has been quite the challenge but I’m happy to say that even after all of us return to Princeton, we will live on the in the yellow submarine. I get quite the number of quizzical looks from patients but they are curious and excited for some color in the room. I am thoroughly enjoying the process and happy that painting is something I can do anywhere in the world.

The installation of the Open Medical Record System has been, in short, a frustrating nuisance. The clinic has four donated laptops that are eventually to be used for an electronic medical system that is linked by a local network. The program, Open MRS, is supposedly designed for use in developing countries but it has proved to be the exact opposite. Henry has been working on this while I have been painting, and the four programs that must be downloaded in order to make the system run cannot seem to find each other on the computer. Henry has been playing around with the code but our lack of computer science/engineering backgrounds aren’t helping us. The program recommends that an IT tech be on hand for the first three months of usage for troubleshooting, a requirement that is rather preposterous given that it is supposed to be for developing areas. Luckily, Dr. Barrie has an IT person coming in November to help out around the clinic so if we can get the basic software and local network set up the IT tech can then help the staff through transitioning to electronic medical records. With their growing number of patients, an electronic system would be greatly beneficial but hopefully the complexity of the software and technology won’t be an impediment.

Lastly, we went to see the new Kono Public Library with Kulani, one of the GAF interns, today. It took two years to build but it is an absolutely beautiful and incredibly spacious building. It is still completely empty, although books will be arriving this coming week. They have planned for a children’s department, a reference center, lending department, and two computer labs to be used as internet cafes to both library members as well as the general public. They will need much assistance getting an internet cafe up and running since it will be the first of its kind in this area and will not be financially supported by the Sierra Leone Library Board as the rest of the library is. We are considering helping them with this for our next project since this will allow the library to have a constant source of revenue and use that profit to hire staff who can lead reading sessions and classes for both children and adults. The schools here in Kono do not have libraries and very few people have access to books. The hope is that the internet cafe will attract community members and encourage them to explore the educational opportunities offered by the library as well. We will return to the library later this week with more questions and also check out the Central Library in Freetown to see how they are run. The current plan is to return to Freetown on Sunday so that we will have time to explore the library and how the US Embassy sets up their wireless network.

Tonight we’ll be having a small feast at Uncle Ben’s! Another Princetonian, Matthias, is coming to Uncle Ben’s so we will splurge a little and enjoy the luxury of eating some chicken, a meat that is much more expensive than beef here. Time for a motorbike ride in the pouring rain to get back to Uncle Ben’s…nothing like the pleasures of the rainy season here.

-Zoe

Neal and I are wrapping up our time in Freetown. The idiosyncrasies of travel into and out of Sierra Leone required us to get into Freetown with time to spare. Our flight technically leaves tomorrow around 3 am, but the last ferry to the airport is at 6pm, so we’ll stock up on street food and snacks, grab a taxi, and be on our way pretty soon. There isn’t all that much to do in Freetown, at least without a car and in the part of town we’re staying in. We visited the Sierra Leone National Museum, which is basically two rooms and has a few artifacts. We think the coolest one was a small cloth Sierra Leonean flag which was brought on Apollo 11, along with some moon rocks that the US government presented to the country back in ’69. We’ve done plenty of aimless wandering around the streets and marketplaces, as well as watched half of the first season of Mad Men on Neal’s computer and finished about 4 books. At this point, I think we have adequately sampled just about every type of food product this country has to offer. We also have been making a mental list of all the things one could theoretically buy for Le 10,000 (US$2.50): prostitute for one night, one hundred blunts, one same-sex hotel room upgrade (it’s cheaper to room guy/girl at Uncle Ben’s – some places don’t allow same-sex rooming at all), ten baguettes, ten liquor packs in Freetown (ketchup-bag style), five plates of rice and beans a woman is selling out of a bucket on the corner, 3 hours and twenty minutes of internet, two guys to dig most of a 6 ft x 6ft x 6ft ditch, one hundred pieces of kanya, two lappas (piece of cloth large enough to make a skirt).

Today, we also met with Simon from EFO, the head guy and our initial contact. We had a good meeting, just to debrief how the project went. Aside from some people-skill issues with Jalloh, on the whole, we felt the project was a great success. In my earlier post, I lamented that progress here was slow. But there is still progress, and projects like ours and the many others that EFO has planned (solar panel installations are growing, slowly but surely – Simon mentioned a new system available for about US$100 that uses LED lights and a single panel, scaled for an individual home that seems to be a promising option) at other clinics, schools, orphanages, and other non-profit-type installations throughout the country. He’s pretty dedicated to the growth of renewable energy in Sierra Leone, also teaching at GTI, where some of the instructors for the next school year were recently students themselves, so the knowledge is going local.

Neal and I are really excited/happy/relieved that we saw this project to the end. Last year, Dr. Barrie mentioned that plenty of white people come to Sierra Leone, take pictures, make promises, and never come back. That’s always been in the back of our minds through the year as we applied for grants and made plans for this year’s trip. Especially since NOW/GAF is, in our eyes, such an outstanding example of an effective and transparent organization that makes a real difference on the ground (if anyone out there is looking for a worthy cause for monetary donations, definitely consider these guys: www.go-act.org). It’s easy to see all the needs and poverty and feel like there’s not really much that can be done. But it’s been a great reminder to see such tangible effects and know that health care for the people of Koidu has just improved – ultrasound machine, forthcoming x-ray machine, liver function tests, kidney function tests, bloodwork, refrigeration, even a simple fan in the observation room to provide just a little more relief to a sick patient.

We’ve both been wondering if/when we’ll be back. We sure hope so. I don’t know when, but maybe there will be some way to have our respective med/grad schools send us back in a few years. In any event, we look forward to following the progress of the clinic in Kono and the EWB team back at Princeton as they continue this great partnership.

In the words of Neal’s interestingly-translated extemporaneous speech at the lab’s opening ceremony: “plenti plenti tenki tenki tenki tenki” (or something like that). Basically, thanks to everyone – the EWB team at Princeton (and Eric and Chris) for their work on this project, our sponsors for making this entire thing possible (Davis Family Projects for Peace, PEI/Grand Challenges, Fred Fox Fund, and the Class of 1978 Fund), Elsie and the Pace Center for their encouragement during the year, NOW/GAF (Bailor, Dan, and Kathy) for presenting us with this opportunity (which was a great learning experience for us as well), our friends and blog followers and anyone has e-mailed us while we were here, our families for “letting” us jet off to Sierra Leone and for their love and support, and of course, the people of Sierra Leone who welcomed us and let us into their lives and taught us so much more than we could have ever imagined about life and their culture and international development and who knows what else.

See you all back in the US,
Meghan and Neal

We started off yesterday seeing Meghan and Neal off in style in a nice spacious car with a personal driver. Initially intending to start on painting our wall (the one now surrounding our solar system’s batteries) and setting up Dr. Barrie’s computer system, Rafi and BJ invited us to join them on their quest to buy goats for their animal farming project they were starting in certain amputee camps. With a supposedly hot tip as to where to get good goats, we motored off two on each bike for a 5000 Le ride (from uncle ben’s to the clinic is about 4 miles and cost 2000 Le so you judge the distance) to some village about 7 miles from Wordu, the first amputee camp they were going to buy goats as the pen they had had built there was finished. Considering the dirt roads, which lead to small villages outside Koidu, are perpetually uneven and treacherous to bikes through erosion inducing rainfall, I have to say the ride out was the most gnarly (and I only use that word when absolutely necessary) bike ride I’ve ever been on. After our bike picked up a little mud and we could feel the back wheel occasionally slipping a little beneath our weight on turns, I found myself just wondering exactly when the bike would topple over or whether the bike would make it up certain hills (luckily, we’ve lost some weight while here). Though thankfully no bikes failed, BJ did manage to topple backward off his bike when on a brutal uphill portion of the road. Still we all arrived in one piece…only to discover there were no goats!

After briefly sitting in a central meeting hut and talking to a few of the villagers (the chief was out), one offered to take us to the next village over where there were some goats. This is when our trek through the wilderness began as we followed an about 8 inch wide trail through rolling hills with elephant grass towering above us at all times and beautifully green and vast vistas occasionally emerging in front of us. One of the more notable moments involved our being carried across a narrow, shallow, and slow flowing river on our translator or the villager’s back so as to avoid getting any parasites that may be in the water. Both men are smaller than I am and I found myself both worried and impressed as I help my perch. After finally reaching the next village which grew rice and raised many cattle, we found a few goats but these were at first not for sale since the man of the house had gone out into town. By sharing a little poyo (palm wine) with the locals though, they reconsidered but only to settle for the most outrageous prices (i.e. $50 per goat when we were looking for $25 per goat and the expected to be more expensive goats sold in town were going for about $30 last time they had checked…also had a higher risk of carrying a disease called PPR though). We thus decided to continue our trek into the wilderness to the next village where we sent our translator ahead to bargain down prices (so as to avoid the “white man price”). The attempt was unsuccessful however and, after a long trek back to the village, we decided to try our many-times-again-unsuccessful luck by visiting villages along the walk back to the clinic. At least the views were still gorgeous and we also happened upon some diamond miners at work in a riverbed.

Finally back in more familiar territory, we found some more poyo, better than the morning’s poyo which was already better than the one Meghan had found in town. To those who think we were, at this point, no longer drinking responsibly…palm wine is both relatively low alcohol content and pretty rehydrating so let’s just say it was a necessity! About an hour from sunset at this point, we chose to rush off once again on bikes to the sheep and goat yard in town Rafi and BJ had first visited. After arguing, pleading, saying “crazy craz” a lot, turning away in disgust, and walking away in fake disinterest, we finally got our first two goats for 200 000 total, one male and one female, both relatively young but healthy and thus enough for our purposes. A little more haggling and we hooked a mother and her two kids for another 300 000, all approved by some impromptu (and honestly not sure how legitimate) veterinarian who hangs around there. To get to Wordu faster, we loaded once again onto bikes with one goat each. Not sure how everyone’s else’s ride went but I was holding the male (by the legs as per instructions) who, after the first 5 minutes during which he seemed to be enjoying himself while wide-eyed and looking at everything rushing by, started bleating regularly and struggling to get his front paws free (not a good idea on a moving bike but he didn’t grasp the concept). Still we (the goat and I) made it safely to Wordu where we were greeted by a mass of villagers and a few amputees welcoming us and leading us to the now constructed goat pen. We also had a chance there to listen to Tboi’s rap (which Meghan had told us so much about). He sang “Money in the Bank” to us with his brother and they then showed us some break dancing (a version of break dancing full with contortions apparently). Some more poyo (sweetest yet) and we rode back into town for an overdue meal, accidentally meeting up with Kulani and Nicky there.

Sunday was a good full day of adventures but is also got me to consider why I was so glad I’d come out here to help. When I think about the condition of Salonians and how we’re hopefully contributing to improving their lives, for all the impact the clinic has (and thus presumably helping the clinic have a good source of electricity will have), it’s sometimes disheartening how small a drop in the bucket our project is. And our project is not a small drop. In other words, I do think we’re having a considerable and measurable impact on a fairly vast part of the communities in and around Koidu thanks to the clinic’s still building popularity. So I’m certainly glad about our adventure here and our project’s design but, when realizing the pervasiveness of the country’s infrastructural inadequacies and how these affect the population, it’s sometimes tough to fathom how one of us can “change the world”. But it’s exactly this thought that leads me to my usual optimistic streak. Though installing this solar panel system may be only one more inch towards the sort of life we want all Salonians to enjoy, with guaranteed access to healthcare, sustenance, and education at the very least, the project itself had undeniably marked each one of us and, perhaps, will inspire us all to seek to help further in the future or inspire the luckiest Salonians to choose to stay and help rebuild their country, much like Dr. Barrie has. So rather than seeing how $29 000 contributes presently in helping Salone, I imagine the domino effect such a project will hopefully lead to. Time will tell but I’ve never been one for pessimism. After all, we did get those goats in the end.

Meghan and I arrived this afternoon in Freetown after a long bumpy ride back from Kono in the SUV hired by Sarah and Henrik (sp?). We’re staying at a hotel called “the Place” in the center of Freetown. The city is just as gray and rainy as the last time we were here. However, we did get a surprise treat riding into town today when we were overtaken by the Sierra Leone president’s motorcade. Using some quick thinking our driver waited for the motorcade to pass and then proceeded to stealthily slip our SUV at the back of the procession. The police at the front of the procession cleared us a traffic-free path into town, thereby saving us about an hour’s worth of waiting in traffic. Cutting in line never felt so good (bad?).

M and I are a bit tired from the journey but might come up with some new insights tomorrow.

-Neal