Kathy Cooper, a MAP Fellow at SIBAT in the Philippines, has now been in the Philippines for about a month. SIBAT is a NGO focused on supplying the technical know-how for wind turbine installations and micro-hydropower facilities that provide electricity to rural villages. SIBAT also has a sustainable agriculture program that they integrate with their renewables program to stimulate community level enterprise development. In this blog Kathy shares her experiences from the past month with the Green Empowerment community.
I love being here so far. My coworkers are friendly, open, and very knowledgeable about subjects I want to learn more about. Matt Hart from Stanford is also here as a volunteer, and there is another intern as well, who has been placed here by Engineers Without Borders, named Ewan. He is from Scotland, and he immediately acquainted Matt and I with his friends, a large circle of Australians. Being integrated into a social network right away has made me feel very at home here. The office community has also embraced us with open arms: I am prepared to face off against my coworkers in a highly-anticipated cooking contest, and Gigit (who does SIBAT’s website design) is an experienced Yoga scholar who leads sessions for Ewan, Matt, Char, and I on Thursdays. My balance has already improved.
I’ve been working on an Excel model that allows a user to input cost and revenue data for a micro-hydro plant (materials costs, labor, O&M, depreciation, anticipated usage etc.) and it calculates the NPV and IRR, and shows how the electricity price should be set for cost recovery. I’m also hoping to integrate tariff schedules into the model. Although the cost part of the project is straightforward enough, the revenues aspect is giving me some trouble because I do not know how to estimate usage without surveying the community. I was originally scheduled to visit the project sites, but then Typhoon Ondoy struck (and then Typhoon Parma struck, and now it’s still raining) and many rural areas are inaccessible due to bad roads and mudslides.
Which brings me to the most significant part of my update: Typhoon Ondoy. Manila, where I live, experienced the worst flooding in 70 years exactly one week after I arrived. 80% of a city of 13 million people were submerged, and 300 people died. Over 13 inches of rain came down in less than 6 hours. The volume of water pouring down on the city led government officials to open the flood gates of a dam without warning any of the citizens downstream. This caused river levels to rise about 20 feet in some areas, leading to the total devastation of many river communities.
Matt and I took most of last week off work to help out in the relief effort, which mostly involved carrying boxes and pouring rice from 50 kg bags into smaller bags so it could be distributed. We also got to take apart, clean, reassemble, and test some motors that had been submerged in a workshop that makes toys and wheelchairs, and Matt employed his structures know-how to assess the damages on our boss’s house. Working in the relief effort was a moving experience for me. I was able to see first-hand how relief efforts were largely organized and executed by Manila citizens. They didn’t feel like there was time to depend on the government to organize an emergency response, so they just did it themselves. The city truly mobilized.
Next week Matt and I will go live on a farm for a while. We may do some planting, harvesting, assess the site for a renewable energy project, and learn about bamboo construction, the Filipino language, and local cooking. I love how this Fellowship allows me to do so much hands-on work, and I’m very happy to be here.
