Everything We Set Out to Do

Today was mostly a good-news day. We had been waiting to see how the solar panels and battery bank would perform on a 24hour cycle and today we got our answer. At around 8am this morning the battery bank was down to 50% capacity, which had us worried, but by 1pm the battery bank was back up to 100%! That was with a partly cloudy day. We still have not seen it face a day or multiple days of full rain but even that should be doable once we get our other panels working again. The plan is to have the company that installed it come out next week to get those other panels connected. Overall we are glad to see it running and are optimistic but will still keep an eye on it over the next few months via the Village of Hope staff.

Most of the rest of the day was spent tying off lose ends:

Digging up and removing old sensors (sorry senior design team).

Caulking where cables passed to the outlets.

Installing a couple of flow meters outside the girls' dormitory on the Hope College campus.

Those jobs were not that glorious or fun but they need to happen.

One of the most interesting parts of the day was when we had the privilege of meeting with a group of professors and students from Heritage Christian College in Accra. They are business professionals and students who have developed a business around converting sewage into charcoal for cooking. They won an award a the Global Social Innovation Challenge for their project which you can read about here. We got to have a meal with them and talk about possible collaborations with their current project as well as other projects underway at the college. It was a very encouraging conversation and I really look forward to seeing what partnerships could come from it.

Tomorrow we pack up and clean up before leaving for Accra in the afternoon. Our flight takes off at 11pm and we will have a long layover in London before making our way directly to Nashville. The last thing I hope to accomplish before we leave tomorrow is a conversation with Samuel about how much it would cost to do a future sanitation system out of concrete. If we can get that conversation in then I can say that we did everything we set out to do on this trip.

No matter how that conversation goes God has been good and we are excited to see what good plans he has for us next!