A Trip to Bramadero with Gerson

Gerson, a Portland resident, shares two excerpts from his journal about his trip with Green Empowerment to Nicaragua with PSU students and faculty from Dec. 26, 2008 to Jan. 6, 2009.

We stayed mostly in the village of Bramadero, which is so tiny that it does not show up on Google Earth. We slept in the school in Bramadero, and ate in people’s homes.  These excerpts involve excursions to nearby, equally small villages, to do solar and wind energy projects.

December 28 – A day trip out of Bramadero to Sanzapote to install a small-scale wind turbine to provide electricity for the village.

The wind turbine was designed by a newly graduated aerospace engineer named Dave, based on a design by a guy famous in wind power circles named Hugh Piggott.  The night before, Jay, Jason, Greg, and I were sitting out in front of the school in Bramadero, using our LED headlamps to study the instructions for assembling the turbine (Bramadero has electricity but the school doesn’t).  I was told that Dave’s design is untested – the first of its kind.  As a former software engineer, I declared that an untested design can not possibly work, but we’ll find out how it doesn’t work so it can be fixed.  Dave himself is supposed to arrive in Nicaragua shortly.

So we walked to Sanzapote from Bramadero (maybe an hour and a half on a terrible road, with horses carrying equipment, bottled water, and a couple of people).   The site for the turbine is at the top of a hill, very windy.  When we got there, some local guys did the heavy work of digging a hole for the footing in soil that’s mostly rock, and then mixing concrete for the footing.  We got the tower erected, held up by guy wires, with the turbine blades and generator mounted on the tower, having worked around various problems, and true to my prediction it didn’t work (long story), but the engineer, when he gets here, can fix it.  A large number of people in the community turned out to help and watch.

A young girl stands at her doorway

Our meals are mostly rice, beans, and corn tortillas, with some squash and usually some cheese and/or egg. I’m finding it more satisfying and less boring than I expected and feeling like I’ve gotten used to eating more protein and fat than necessary at home. Today for lunch the people of Sanzapote served us chicken stew, our first meat since we left Managua.   I wish I could have gotten a photo of one of the people who brought us our food, a beautiful young woman in a dress-for-success business suit – a short skirt and jacket-like top; flip flops on her feet, a big plastic tub full of food balanced on her head, and a grin on her face that said she felt very pretty in this outfit.  Her husband, the chair of the local energy committee, was a pretty snappy dresser himself, wearing a perfectly pressed lemon yellow dress shirt (in a village without electricity!), and I think apparently he felt she was flaunting herself  too much, because he was mean to her.  Their clothes, and the chicken stew, indicate what a special occasion it was for a bunch of gringos to come and install a windmill.

January 3 –  Corozo

Corozo is a village of 30 households sparsely scattered over a large area, with no road access, the only place we had to actually backpack to.  We hiked up a trail for 45 minutes to get there, and spent one night on the school floor.  They have no electricity and they carry their water from a creek.  All but two of the 30 households are getting solar panels on their roofs, in a micro-credit deal with Asofenix.  They will pay the loans back over 3 years.  The biggest system is 125 watts, costing $1000+ and the smallest is 50 watts, costing $600, with $100 down at the time of installation.  We broke into four groups and installed four houses.  The house I was in got one of the smallest systems, 50 watts. Two teenage girls are the village technicians, trained by Asofenix.  They will maintain the systems in all the houses.  They were in our house and we involved them in the installation.  A solar panel on the roof is wired to a controller box on an interior wall.  The electricity is stored in a battery the size and shape of a car battery.  The battery will last about 4 years and costs about $100. There is one 11-watt mini-fluorescent bulb on the ceiling with a switch near the door, and there is a little AC converter  box with two outlets.  You can plug in any two things you want, as long as they don’t use over 50 watts total, or 39 if the light is turned on.

When we got it all wired up, the man in the house (who is not married to the woman who owns the house, but seems to live there) went over and flipped the switch and there was light.  The woman’s first words after that were, “¿Puedo cargar mi teléfono ahora?” (Can I charge my telephone now?)

The kitchen remains dark, although it is possible to wire in another light bulb in that room.  It is a typical kitchen of that area: a windowless room with an open wood fire.  There is no chimney and the smoke goes out through the porous tile roof.

$600 is not cheap for a single 11-watt light bulb, but they can also charge their cell phone and flashlights, and they can have a small TV or radio.  It’s a big difference from nothing.  The larger systems (over 100 watts) may be able to run a blender or sewing machine, but no irons or cooking appliances.

In the evening, several families brought us food at the school.  At least one family had to walk 45 minutes in the dark carrying food from their house, and later walked back home, but they seemed to be in a festive mood and having a good time.

Aside from the good our projects do for people, they are a demonstration of small-scale, appropriate technology.  In the US, we expect big corporations to somehow solve the problem of renewable energy (with subsidies from big government for R&D).  Small scale projects are another way to do it.  For example, Bramadero is on the Nicaragua national power grid, but their water is pumped by solar energy.  It’s also redundant.  The grid burns fossil fuel and goes down often.  Individual town systems also go down, but not all at the same time.  A lot of people in the U. S. seem to assume that we’ll be able to go on using energy the way we are, and a solution will be found to make it renewable, or to make coal “clean” or something.  I believe that we’re going to have to end up using a whole lot less energy than we’ve become accustomed to, and we’re going to have to generate a lot of it on a small scale, at the level of individual towns and individual households, such as rooftop solar panels and wind turbines.

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