July 6, 2007 - Ethiopia

Although the Ethiopian government is making a huge push to extend the electricity grid to rural villages, you can still drive past countless villages without electricity. In most instances, a high voltage power line passes straight through a village without a transformer anywhere in sight.

In Tukul, a village we visited today, several solar panels have sprouted from the rooftops, announcing the early arrival of electricity. The person responsible for installing and repairing each panel is a woman villager. Three years ago, she went to Barefoot College in India and was trained to become a solar engineer. Barefoot College is an organization that recruits poor, illiterate villagers from around the world and trains them to become solar engineers. Grant money given to Barefoot College goes to purchasing solar panels, battery packs, and wiring that the engineers bring back to their home village to install on all the homes.

Dogs barked at us and chased our car as we pulled up to the Tukul village solar workshop. From what I could see, the building operates jointly as a workshop and the village's public phone booth. In one room, a few girls sat around an old landline phone, just chatting with each other. When we came in, they opened the door to the workshop for us. Embarrassed giggles rose into the air as they noticed a package of condoms on the floor of the phone booth. One girl kicked it beneath the desk as we walked past them into the other room.

There was a wall of shelves behind a nice big work bench. Voltmeters, ammeters, wires, and solar lanterns lay neatly in boxes along the shelves. Everything was in its place, but for the solar engineers, who were nowhere to be seen. Unfortunately, a villager told us that the woman engineer had gotten malaria, so we decided to visit her home and wish her a quick recovery.

Although she was very weak, she was eager to show us an article that was published about the project and a picture of herself back in India. When she had first returned to Ethiopia, she worked with a partner engineer, a handicapped man who was also trained at Barefoot College. As it turns out, he did not perform his tasks very well and the woman decided she could not work with him, so he ultimately went to a different village.

On the whole, the project has been challenging for her. Although she is able to install all the solar systems, the villagers have not been willing to pay for her work and she has not yet stepped up to report them to the government. I hope that as time goes on and more solar engineers are trained from villages across Africa, they can start to work together to initiate new projects and support each other.

With lunch on the horizon and Alex feeling a bit under the weather, we went back to the hotel for lunch and Alex decided to spend the afternoon in our room to take it easy.

Unfortunately, he had to miss the best part of the day - a manufacturing site visit. A manufacturing site visit!!! As you can imagine, it was a dream come true. I am very interested in manufacturing and just took Professor Dave Beach's ME 219 course last quarter, looking at manufacturing in the U.S. Now we were going to an Ethiopian company called Bruh-Tesfa ("a brighter future") to see drip irrigation system manufacturing.

It was a small manufacturing plant with two polyethylene extrusion machines - one for HDPE and one for LDPE (high and low density). The LDPE is extruded around a slow-release tube that ensures a certain water drip speed. It is essentially a tube that has a maze of channels that the water must pass through before it drips out. By exchanging the size of the die, they can easily make drip tubes of all different diameters and spacing intervals. Bruh-Tesfa is a social enterprise. They sell their product to farmers as cheaply as possible, but still aim to break even and eventually hope to earn a profit (though not at the expense of the farmers). Recently, they have also started producing plant nursery products - plastic wrappers to protect seedling trees. I caught video of the entire manufacturing process and can't wait to put together an editted video to share!

The afternoon rain started to pour as we bid our farewells and went in search of a present for Kahsai's son, who is graduating from Kindergarten tomorrow. We settled on a soccer ball and pump and also bought some chocolate for his daughter, Dina, to be fair to them both. Just as were finishing our purchases, the president of the University of Mekelle called Kahsai. Our plans to meet with the president this afternoon were still on and he had just finished his meeting with the student senate so we started to make our way over to the university.

The University of Mekelle is just a few years old and is housed in a former military outpost. This means two things: 1) it sits on top of a beautiful hill overlooking the city (a very good strategic location), and 2) the older buildings are very ugly.

The president invited four students from the senate to stay and chat with us. I loved it because I was eager to hear from the new generation of Ethiopian leaders--what are their plans, their hopes, their fears? There were two law students, one electrical engineering student, and a vetrinary sciences student. They were all just as interested to hear what I thought about Ethiopia - my expectations about their country as compared with what I've actually seen. After a week in Ethiopia, I can honestly say I am very hopeful for their country. I see a healthy, supportive government, entrepreneurial people, excitement and tree-planting for the millennium, and great efforts like REST working on the ground on development issues. It is hard to believe we are already leaving tomorrow for a new country and a new culture. We feel like we've really gotten to know Ethiopian history and culture - at least we like to believe we have! In reality, we know very little, but we certainly know enough to be dangerous :)