The Rest of Week 2

The rest of our week flew by because of a holiday on Thursday, Union Day, which celebrates the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. We spent the majority of the rest of the week practicing burns, working on briquetting a bit, and enjoying our time off.

On Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon we practiced burns with the coffee husk stove and camp stove in a small annex of EARD-CI. We tried burning small, medium, and large sized sawdust, rice husks, and coffee husks. We soon realized that the materials were not nearly dry enough as most did not catch fire, and the ones that did, namely the medium and large sized sawdust smoked heavily.

We set out some of the materials to dry in the sun we got on Wednesday and tried the burns again, both in the coffee husk stove and the camp stove. We got everything to burn in the camp stove after it was completely dry, although the rice husks choked out the fire and needed to be constantly stirred. We’re curious to try mixing the rice husks with something that allows for more airflow like the coffee husk and see if it’ll burn then.

We also spent Friday morning working on briquetting. We decided to let the compost pile we started be and not open it for another week to make sure that it will have composted to the appropriate degree to make 100% agro briquettes. We need to see how such briquettes could be made because the village in this area do not have easy access to paper or cassava flour. Although none of us know much about composting, we’re hoping that between our compost pile and the village’s compost, we’ll be able to put things together to make an agro based briquette.

We created a briquette mixture on Friday of small seed shells from the village, leaves from the village, and charcoal left over from our successful burns. Because we were trying to dry out the wood which was wet and starting to mold, we did not actually press the briquette. It did pass the various tests of squeezing, oozing, and dropping mentioned in the briquetting manuals.

In the afternoon, we went down the street to get some linseed oil to finish the press to make sure it didn’t mold further. The store we bought the oil from was owned by two retired Ivy League graduates, one from Cornell and the other from Yale. They were super excited to meet us and were giving us advice on the briquettes. They suggested to us to use cow manure as a binder. The agro waste is already pretty gross to touch for us, but this is something we are considering. They also told us to check out Carmatec which is the government’s alternative fuel center which could direct us to specific plants we might want to use in our briquettes or specific people we might want to talk to. It was wonderful running into these guys who were so helpful and wanting to speak with us again.

It’s really been quite weird who we ran into on Friday. After heading back to the backpacker’s hostel, we went to dinner at the Indian place across the street and Misha saw a fellow classmate from Middlebury there. We chatted with them for a bit and learned so much about what he and his friend were doing on the study abroad and what they’ve learned in the past three months here.  It was such a productive week. We’re anticipating a lot of work next week where we’re planning on visiting three villages, six NGO’s, and doing a stove demonstration. Hopefully all goes smoothly and we’ll get a lot of information on what’s happening in Arusha.