Getting into the Colombo Groove

If you add up all the miles we’ve driven in a three-wheeler in the past two and a half months, it comes to about 750 kilometers. That is seventy times the length of the tallest redwood tree and one-tenth the length of the Great Wall of China. It is the equivalent distance of nearly two trips to Pokunatenna (the village headquarters for the project) and enough experience to know that I would never actually want to take a three-wheeler to Pokunatenna. In short, it is 750 kilometers of authentic three-wheeler lifestyle:

- gliding between lories and buses or finding yourself wedged between three and debating if this or second hand smoking is worse

- coming head to head with another three-wheeler and wondering who forgot about Colombo’s one-way street system (which is subject to change according to the whims of security check point officers)

- talking with your neighbor at the security check points to avoid digging out your passport (when was the last time a young white girl carried an LTTE bomb into Colombo?)

- squishing three people into a seat that should only hold two; then adding metal poles, a chop saw, and other goodies from Panchikawadtha (the nearest Sri Lankan equivalent to Home Depot and the Mecca of auto parts, old and new)

- jumping out of the three wheeler because there’s been a short circuit underneath the driver’s seat (and waving away the ensuing cloud of smoke)

- reading news magazines to pass the time from Colombo to Padukka, where we manufacture our ceramic firebox

- practicing the days of the week in Sinhalese with the driver: I shout Monday and he shouts Tuesday, I shout Wednesday, he shouts Thursday, and we practice until the endless loop drives David mad

Each three-wheeler is different. For a Colombo driver, the way you decorate your three-wheeler is as much a reflection of your skills as a car mechanic as it is a reflection of your passion for the color green, Buddha statues, pretty girls, or (in the case of our favorite driver) really loud base. Our driver’s name is Kalu and in addition to retrofitting his vehicle with a really nice sound system, he has added an L.E.D.-lit phone stand, a digital clock, and various nameplates displaying the names of auto manufacturers.

In Sri Lanka, car cleanliness is next to Godliness. The best example is our Colombo-to-village transport: a man by the name of Mark. Before starting his van, he quickly meditates, gives blessings over the steering wheel, and looks regretfully at the gasifier gear that we have freshly loaded into his vehicle. For someone who takes his car in for a checkup after a mere afternoon outside Colombo, we are nothing short from a headache. All of our tools, not to mention the high quality welding machine, are back in Colombo so when it comes time for a system modification, we jump on any chance to bring gasifier parts back to Colombo. Leaving minimal space for human cargo, we load Mark’s van with tarry test probes, gliricidia wood, coolers, and piping. Nearly every part of the gasifier has seen the back of Mark’s car…not to mention the mouse that decided to come along the last time we drove back from Pokunatenna (sorry Mark!). I am impressed that he still offers to take us anywhere at all after we left his van in a paddy field overnight. But what can you do when the rainy season takes its toll on the dirt roads?

The trouble is that Pokunatenna is enchanting. The rainy season brings mud, but it also delivers a thousand white birds perched on half-submerged trees in reservoirs that reflect a thousand more birds in the symmetrical twilight. It brings water buffalo with heads that turn inquisitively to follow you as you walk along the water’s edge. It brings elephants in the night, snapping tree trunks like toothpicks and munching their way through the garden as you sleep. And beyond nature’s beauty, Pokunatenna brings Colombans back to their roots. As soon as we arrive, Mark disappears and soon emerges donning a sarong delivering a round of Sri Lankan-style tea. We quickly become a part of the village—at one in the morning we join in the Katina celebrations (a festival to commemorate the end of the rainy season and the monks’ decision to come out from isolation in the monastery); eat wood apple and wild cherries; and by moonlight, we learn to play cricket.

The surprising reality is that a Katina in one village may only be the start of the rainy season in another. In fact, a three-hour drive across Sri Lanka (either north towards the beaches, south towards the dry lands, or inland towards the mountains) can yield three different microclimates.

From an engineering perspective, this adds a spin bowl (not to bring up cricket again). The challenge is to finish manufacturing and delivering a system before the rains create treacherous rivers.

Village 7 lies beyond a large river—an unbridged river, at that. Anxious to install the gasifier before the rains set in, the villagers selected an auspicious date in early December for the gasifier inauguration. Their gasifier was sitting in the Colombo workshop—complete, tested, and ready to send. That is, until David and I decided to change the cooler design. Based on villager feedback, we designed an improved-flow cooler with larger tar traps. With all due respect for the challenges of carrying a gasifier across a roaring river, we knocked on wood and lit a fire under the manufacturing operation. If we just “shipped” the system (across the river) with the old cooler, chances of modifying it later would become infinitesimal (if you want to weld in the village, you need a welding machine, which requires power, but you can’t provide power with a gasifier that doesn’t have cooler…). One week later, fabrication and testing were complete and the system is now in the village and ready for delivering light.

Even work in Colombo is not without its trials. Our official uniform is tar and if you don’t find us at the drawing board, we’re up on the hopper loading wood. Our biggest nemesis (barring Tar and his evil brother Dust) is wet wood. Luckily, the solution is right across the road at the local bakery. Before running tests, we riddle the wood, load it into bags, and carry it through a small patch of jungle to the baker’s, where we load it on trays and voila…the new special for the day: baked wood. We can’t let the wood go above 200 degrees Celsius for fear of changing its structure, but the ambient heat of the oven is enough to bring the moisture content down to fifteen percent.

As always, engineering is a battle and there are days when David says we may have done the world a service by not getting out of bed. These are the days when the test probes go haywire (and need calibrating) or the temperatures never rise in the firebox or Andi burns her leg on a cyclone or David chops his finger on our new Gliricidia chopper.

Fortunately, these moments are juxtaposed to moments of enlightenment that keep us all sane. This week’s epiphany was brought in the form of a Prakash engineer. His name is Rajesh and he is none other than the managing director and son of the founder of the Prakash company. He also happens to be a brilliant mechanical engineer who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Prakash is one of India’s largest engine manufacturers and one of the few producer genset manufacturers in the world and we have selected their 15KVA Prakash Biomass Generator as our standard genset—it is essentially a modified diesel engine (but with lots of gasifier-relevant bells and whistles—the main one being a gas/air mixture governor).

Biomass generators are Rajesh’s hobby and he has been our primary contact for issues of engine wear and tear since our first purchase. In a world wear everything seems to take twice as long as it should (because this or that machine is broken, or this or that worker went home), Rajesh’s operation is refreshing. Up to now, our requests for engine modifications have always been nearly instantaneously satisfied and Rajesh is already sending us a newly designed silencer, a longer-lasting ignition switch (with solenoid), metal valve seals, and a new frame configuration (with wheels for extra mobility). From implementing “bush engineering” (aka simple but effective plastic tube u-tube manometers) to giving the village operators a workshop on proper governor set-up and maintenance, Rajesh pushed our operation miles forward.

As a result, David and I are busy churning out lots of drawings before we dash away to spend the New Year with our families. Instead of a gift wish list, Ariyasenna’s Christmas present is a long list of parts to manufacture before we return. It includes a tar trap, modifications to the wood chopper, cooler version 2.0, and couplings for the newest castable firebox.

Friday, it's off to Los Gatos for two days before fleeing the harsh California winters for the familiarly tropical Hawaii.

Until then, the Christmas trees, fake icicles, and shimmering holiday lights continue to multiply all over Colombo, while Sri Lanka maintains a humid 30 degrees and the Buddhist trash men ask for a Christmas bonus on December 1st.