Week 2: Batteries and better trees
Getting to know Senegal
We were delighted to witness and participate in the festivities of Tabaski with Daha and his family in Louga. The evening brought some enlightening conversations between us, Daha and Fatou (Daha’s wife), which helped us understand the history of Senegal and some of the differences in our perspectives on life, love, and work.
Getting Started
On Monday, we returned to the airport to look for our luggage once more. Emma, Lise and Cas were finally reunited with their beloved luggage. But sadly, Maxim would have to wear the same two T-shirts a little bit longer.
Travellers sickness and fatigue due to the heat were already giving us a hard time but we wouldn’t let this stop us from starting with our project. Maxim and Emma spent their time building the pilot installation in Ndalla which will be used to test solar tracking and induction cooking.
In the meantime, Cas and Lise attended the monthly meeting of Copifor (the organisation which owns the water tower in Syer and is responsible for the invoicing and collecting of the payments of its water consumption) to better understand the invoicing system that is currently failing in both Syer and Ndalla, and to discuss our next steps towards a solution.
On Thursday evening, we returned to the airport once more. As they say, third time’s a charm: Maxim finally found his long lost luggage. As we are simply not able to keep things simple when it comes to luggage, we also took the bag of a Belgian woman who we met in Lisbon, but already returned to Belgium, with us.
We spent the night in Dakar and bought the needed cooking wares for our induction stoves the next day.
Sweaty greetings,
Lise, Emma, Cas and Maxim