Solar Panels for Iringa, Tanzania 2024

My colleague K has just arrived in Iringa, Tanzania, to prepare for the arrival of the team.  He just sent back a photograph of the night sky which made us all envious.  Most of us have not been to too many places where you can just look up at night and take such a photograph just with a camera in a mobile phone.  Even in a country such as Rwanda, the night sky is often hazy enough to obscure most of the stars.  

This year I will not get to Tanzania.  But the team who is arriving this weekend will install 200 sets of solar panels in a remote village.  Tanzania is a big country, bigger in area than France, more than double the area of Germany.  

It is so wild you can wild animals from the highway driving through the country.  OK, the highway runs through a national park.  But where else does that happen?  

Iringa is a small town in the central part of Tanzania. It is served by 13-seat propeller planes from the air. And the village we are serving is more than 2 hours outside Iringa, about half of that on unpaved, dirt roads.  It is partly due to its remoteness that they do not have access to electrical power.  So our team will travel there by an 8-hour bus ride from Dar Es Salaam o the coast. 

This project is one of the most difficult to set up.  I went to Tanzania for the first time in 2018, to explore opportunities for projects.  In 2019, I went again with G and K, to Dodoma where we had found a good site an hour outside Dodoma and a good partner based in Dodoma. Suitable accommodation was found, and transportation arranged. Funding was already available. A project was planned for 2020.  And then, of course, Covid-19 hit and the project had to be cancelled.  Things happened and the original project in Dodoma is no longer possible, even after the pandemic.  

In 2023, we tried again.  This time we target Iringa, with another organization as a partner, and a new site, even more remote than the original one outside Dodoma.  But with some of the same people, except that they now work for different organisations.  

Looking back, it has taken us many years, multiple trips, and so much effort, to set up this project near Iringa.  I was really looking forward to going with the team, to see the project happen, to see the dream come true, for us, for the people there.  Unfortunately, it was not to be.  It turns out I cannot go this year because of commitments elsewhere.  But K is there and other colleagues are there with the students.  I am confident the project will be successful. I will be happy for it.  

In fact, for this year, other than the solar panel project, we also have two STEM education projects, and one English communication project in Tanzania.  We will review the situation after the summer and decide how to proceed.  

Teacher Development Course 2024

We have just completed our popular Teacher Development Course on Service-Learning.  This course, as the name implies, is designed to train teachers to teach service-learning.  We have been running various versions of if since 2014.  In the beginning, we offer the course to train teachers from our own university.  Then we open it up to teachers from other universities in Hong Kong.  Then we open it up to teachers from secondary schools from Hong Kong.  Then we open it up to teachers from foreign universities.  

In the past, we have often run the course in Cambodia, to coincide with some of our projects over there, so that we have take the participants to visit the projects, speak with teachers, students and partners.  This year we decided to publicise it in a number of foreign countries in South East Asia, and run it in Hong Kong.  We ended up with 20+ participants, with the majority of them coming from Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam, in addition to those from Hong Kong.  

We discuss the basic principles of service-learning, how to design a subject, how to design a project, how to teach reflection, how to assess students, how to evaluate a subject and how to do research on SL.  Most importantly, we share with them our vast experience in conducting SL over 15 years, in so many different countries  and regions (HK, Mainland China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Indonesia, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Africa, …) across so many disciplines, targeting such a wide range of clients.  

We also let them observe some of our projects in action.  In one of them, some ethnic minority students come to our School of Hotel and Tourism’s experimental facilities to learn about running a restaurant.  

Our participants are very motivated and passionate.  They ask so many questions, share much of they own experiences.  We ask each of them to make as proposal for a subject.  We then provide them with comments, and then ask them to revise their proposals.  This has been a most exhausting but also satisfying four days.  

  

Rwanda 2024 mapping done

In three days of hard work, our advance mapping team successfully created a digital map of 420 houses in a roughly 12 square kilometre area in the city of Rwamagana.  These are the houses for whom our project team will install solar panels for electricity in the second half of July.  

The site this year is in the City of Rwamagana near the river Nyabarongo,  This river has different names at different places.  It meanders generally northwards into Lake Victoria.   The River Nile flows out of Lake northwards, through Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan, Egypt, into the Mediterranean Sea.  Hence it is considered by some to be the source of the Nile.  Theoretically, if one drops a little boat into the Nyabarongo, when we are working in the area, the boat can follow the River Nile and eventually reach the Mediterranean. 

This map is going to be an important instrument to guide the effort of installation of hte solar panel systems.  Each house can now be identified by a number, the name of the house owner, a geographical coordinate position which can be loaded into mapping applications, and a photograph.  The next step is to assign a group of neighbouring houses to each small working team.  Th installation will start in mid July.  

Rwanda mapping

Here we are, a 4-person advance team is in Rwanda to prepare for the big flagship project in July.  This year the project aims to do two things.  First is to install solar panels for 420 household so that they can have electricity for basic lighting, phone charging, small radio, etc.  Second is a local fashion project to train village tailors to make modern clothing for the underprivileged, integrating local garment designs and colours with modern techniques and styles.  

One of the core elements to the solar project is determining which households to serve, and where they are.  For the Rwanda countryside, there are no detailed street maps on which one can identify a house by street name and number.  Households are identified by district, sector, cell, village (with possibly 100+ households) and isibo (the lowest level of local government unit with dozens of households).  The precise location of each house is known only by the people who live there.  

Our partner, AEE Rwanda, works with the local government to identify the households that we serve: in the bottom two categories of poverty, who do not have electricity (from the power grid, or individual solar systems they purchased themselves or otherwise acquired).  A list of 420 household names across 5 villages is then complied.   Then we have to create a digital map of the precise geographical location of each and everyone of the houses.  Without which the installation cannot proceed.  That is the major task for the advance team during this week.  

Last year, we served 400 households at several villages near Lake Mugesara.  A pin marks a household, colour coded to the village.  This site is roughly 40 kilometres from Kigali.  But the last 20 kilometres are unpaved.  Hence it takes at least an hour and a half to get there from Kigali in a car, when there is not too much traffic on the road coming out from Kigali.   That digital map for the 400 households took about 3 days to create.  We have to walk up to the house, under the guidance of someone from the village, geo-code it on the digital map app, and put a physical label on the house so that the installation team can identify it later.  

This year we have to do he same for the new site, to the west of last year’s site.  At the moment identified only by 2 green pins representing two reference points in the site.  On the first day, we mapped out 143 houses.  We are on track to finish in 3 days.  Much much more work lie ahead.  We are all excited at the prospect.  

Until 2019, we had been installing solar panels to the north east of Kigali.  Near the very long dragon-like lake at the top of the map.  That is only 20+ kilometres from Kigali.  But mostly unpaved roads, over very hilly terrain,  We spent a lot of time hiking up and down steep hills.  

Alternative to hatred

It is difficult to not get angry at gross injustice. Such as when people in power abuse their power, and persecute, even kill, those who oppose them.  In response, many people express their anger as hatred towards the perpetrators.  It is fully understandable, as humans, to wish misfortune upon the enemy.  

There is, however, an alternative which may turn out to be more satisfying, while causing less damage to oneself.  Which is to pray that the perpetuator(s) would repent, and then be punished by their own conscience.  If and when they do repent, genuinely, they will be tormented by the sins that they committed.  They will regret the hurt they inflicted on their victims. In the end, they may suffer more from their crime. There will also be fewer bad people in this world. 

Hatred is often damaging to the hater.  While the perpetuators of the crimes may not even realised they are being hated.  To pray for the perpetuator to repent however, is very much in line with what God would like us to behave.  

Wouldn’t that be a more satisfying outcome all around?

Of course, a question remains: what if the perpetuator does not repent?  What then, God?