Thursday night I went to a futból game. Or a soccer game. And despite the fact that I´m not a soccer fan whatsoever, I was pretty much ready to do something besides work, sleep, and stay in my room reading The Hitchiker´s Guide to the Galaxy for the 4th time. Yes. 4 times.
So my colleague Fito invited me to a soccer match between two Bolivian professional teams. Aurora, which is from Cochabamba, and Oriental, from Santa Cruz. The match was at Felix Capriles Stadium, which looks a bit like your average college football stadium in the states extept that there´s only one Jumbotron and it´s a little small. Also, attendance was way down. Fito told me that the stadium´s capacity was 30,000 but it was less than a quarter full, probably due to the fact that it was Thursday night. Fito told me that on Sunday when Aurora played the other Cochabamba team this place was going to be packed. I didn´t find that statement too unreasonable, even though right now the total attendance as a percentage of stadium capacity looked like something out of a Cincinnati Reds game.
Not that that was necessarily a bad thing. For 17 Bolivianos me, Fito, and his young son had perfectly good seats near the field and we weren´t crowded. So I sat, watched the soccer game, and serenely drank my Fanta while other fans around me screamed at the line referees using some choice words which aren´t repeatable in polite company. Like most drunk sports fans somewhere in the world, insulting referees favors volume over originality and soon settled into a pattern of and expletive followed by Abrir tus ojos! Open your eyes!
Even though my ability to appreciate soccer games is limited, it seemed pretty good. Aurora scored towards the end of the first half and was up 1-0 at the half, and then the floodgates just opened. In the second half Aurora scored two more unanswered, then put up a fourth goal towards the end of the game and played defense to close it out 4-2. It was as close to an unchallenged beating as a soccer game gets, I suppose. Since most of the crowd seemed to be Aurora fans, I decided it wouldn´t be bad if I was one too. Go Cocha!
Peace,
Drew
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
El Abra Prison
If I ever play a future game of "I Never" with friends I will probably lose, because of this one simple fact and thing that I did. Only time will tell if I will regret it or not. But the trunp card that people can pull on me now is that I don´t think there are many norteamericanos who have been in a Bolivian prison.
Maximum security prison, actually. Its name is El Abra. But, like in Monopoly, I was just visiting. The point of me going with my colleague Fito (a Bolivian engineer) is because we had to deliver new specifications on the rocket stoves to some of the prisoners there, who run a business there manufacturing the exterior parts of the stove. In order to reduce production costs, the outer dimensions of the stove have been made smaller to be able to cut more stoves out of the same pieces of sheet metal. Our task was to cut out and assemble a model stove with the prisoners to make sure everything fit together. In the middle of a rather heavily armed circle of Bolivian police, who wear olive green and look a lot more like an infantry regiment than your average unit of U.S. beat cops.
Actually, the prison workshop and business is a wonderful thing to do, especially in Bolivia where rehabilitation for lawbreakers isn´t exactly a federal priority. I don´t know if the average reader is acquainted with Johnny Cash´s song "Folsom Prison Blues," but I was kind of humming it internally during the whole experience. I actually really wanted to go here, because I haven´t been inside any prison before and I wanted to see what it was like with my own eyes. There are prison experiences, of course, which make all the hardship I´ve experienced so far seem like a ride on the merry-go-round. To give prisoners the dignity of work and earning their own money, not to mention the financial support this provides, is a very good thing that Cedesol and Sobre la Roca does.
And now, on to the activities of the day.
To get to the prison, Fito and I had to take the economy mode of transportation, called a Trufi or a route taxi. A Trufi is a 15-passenger van which drives a specified route through the city just like a bus. A ride costs around Bs. 2, compared to 7-10 Bolivianos on average for just your regular taxi. For me, 7-10 Bolivianos is still less than $1.50, a fare that would make any Manhattanite actually catch fire with jealousy, but for a lot of working Bolivians, the fare´s still a steep price to pay. Just a small thing that illustrates the wealth gap between us and our South-American cousins, to give you a bit of perspective.
At UD, a rule states that you can only put 12 people in a 15-passenger van for safety reasons. I´ve been in one that had 17 people in it before with one person sitting on the console between the driver and front passenger and another on the floor by the sliding door, but I´m not saying when or where in order to protect the guilty. I was not a decision-maker on that particular trip, so no one needs to come knocking on my door demanding an explanation. But that particular trip pales in comparison to the return trip from El Abra, when I counted 22 in the van at one point. That sets one steep record.
Anyway, the Trufi took us to El Abra, which sits in a suburb on the south outskirts of Cochabamba. Although when I say "suburb," I mean "shabby little town with dirt roads and open sewers in the streets." In an ironic reversal of American cities, the affluent of Cochabamba live downtown or close to it and the less fortunate classes live on the outskirts of the city. As a minimally related side note, some American urban planners and smart growth advocates would do well to consider this when they draw up plans for revitalizing inner cities. The point of all those plans is to create cities and communities for people and turning suburbs into the new slums in 20 or 30 years time is not what the term "sustainable development" annotates. But I digress.
We pulled up to El Abra, squeezed our way through the people standing by the taxi door like corks from a bottle, and made our way through the dusty road to visitor processing. There Fito explained to the guard on duty what our business was, which strangely enough resulted in a little small talk, and then we were searched. We then handed over our photo IDs. For Fito, this was his national identification card, for me, my UD student ID. Funny, I guess that little white card does sort of define me now. The guard wrote down Fito´s card number and for a moment I thought he was doing to write down the 8-digit code on my ID, despite the fact that it´s currently nearly 2,000 miles away from any place where it would have any meaning whatsoever.
We got our forearms stamped and were conducted inside the inner fence, and met the foreman of the prison workshop. He took us to the place where they cut and bend the sheet metal for the sides and bottom of the stove, using some very non-automated tools, like tin snips and folding presses which, incidentally, came from the Netherlands somewhere around Arnhem. Seeing all that made me happy because these tools are the ones you use to do an old-school kind of machining that isn´t dependent on complex technology and therefore doesn´t fail when a stepper motor chokes, like with some plasma cutters I know. For the whole morning, Fito and the foreman marked out the stove sides on sheet metal, cut them out with tin snips (think a second-grade skill, only cooler because the scissors are bigger and you´re cutting galvanized steel instead of 8x11) and folded the edges to stiffen them in presses.
They spent the whole morning cutting parts, leaving me largely out of it. Unfortunately, I didn´t feel assertive enough with my Spanish to cut in and I´ve never really cut sheet metal into parts before so I was afraid if I demanded to help out I´d probably screw up somewhere. In second grade I was very good at math and spelling but not the final word in precision when it comes to cutting straight lines.
In fact, I got very bored because the work took longer than expected, partly because after cutting out every single part according to the exact design specifications the foreman suddenly said that there was a problem: the folded edges on the stove sides were too narrow for screws to penetrate and had to be roughly doubled in size. I´m no machinist, but I seem to remember from my Autocad days that you can safely design a hole to be at least its own diameter away from an exterior edge and be perfectly fine when it comes to structural integrity, at least for light-load bearing applications like this. That makes a 3mm hole in a 10mm fold perfectly legit. But I wasn´t exactly making the call on this either.
So we cut new parts with new dimensions and that took the rest of the morning and then the afternoon, until 2:00 on a Saturday which is excessive by any means. We also ate lunch at the prison, which was a bad move. It led to a headache, fever, and chills in the afternoon, diagnosis by Señora Elizabeth, Bolivian host mother and default family practice physician, in the evening, and bed rest through all of Saturday night and Sunday morning. I think the screening of Spanish-dubbed episodes of Dragonball Z in the prison cantina may also have had a part in it. My compañeros asked me if we had this in the states, and I said yes. I added that it was weird because it was a Japanese TV show dubbed in Spanish, so the words didn´t fit how the mouths were moving. Then I realized it was anime and the words never fit how the mouths are moving. Then my compañeros asked me if I watched the show myself in the States. I told them no.
After lunch and a bit more work finishing the parts, we reversed the entering process and I got my trusty student ID back. Here in Bolivia it doesn´t mean much but back at UD it has served as house keys, RecPlex membership and towel collateral, and meal ticket as well as a host of other useful purposes. In a little less than two months it will be gladly back in action again.
Outside the prison we waited for the record-breaking Trufi and rode our ridiculously cheap but crowded way home. And that´s the story of how for six hours on one Saturday in June I was in a Bolivian prison.
Maximum-security prison, actually.
Maximum security prison, actually. Its name is El Abra. But, like in Monopoly, I was just visiting. The point of me going with my colleague Fito (a Bolivian engineer) is because we had to deliver new specifications on the rocket stoves to some of the prisoners there, who run a business there manufacturing the exterior parts of the stove. In order to reduce production costs, the outer dimensions of the stove have been made smaller to be able to cut more stoves out of the same pieces of sheet metal. Our task was to cut out and assemble a model stove with the prisoners to make sure everything fit together. In the middle of a rather heavily armed circle of Bolivian police, who wear olive green and look a lot more like an infantry regiment than your average unit of U.S. beat cops.
Actually, the prison workshop and business is a wonderful thing to do, especially in Bolivia where rehabilitation for lawbreakers isn´t exactly a federal priority. I don´t know if the average reader is acquainted with Johnny Cash´s song "Folsom Prison Blues," but I was kind of humming it internally during the whole experience. I actually really wanted to go here, because I haven´t been inside any prison before and I wanted to see what it was like with my own eyes. There are prison experiences, of course, which make all the hardship I´ve experienced so far seem like a ride on the merry-go-round. To give prisoners the dignity of work and earning their own money, not to mention the financial support this provides, is a very good thing that Cedesol and Sobre la Roca does.
And now, on to the activities of the day.
To get to the prison, Fito and I had to take the economy mode of transportation, called a Trufi or a route taxi. A Trufi is a 15-passenger van which drives a specified route through the city just like a bus. A ride costs around Bs. 2, compared to 7-10 Bolivianos on average for just your regular taxi. For me, 7-10 Bolivianos is still less than $1.50, a fare that would make any Manhattanite actually catch fire with jealousy, but for a lot of working Bolivians, the fare´s still a steep price to pay. Just a small thing that illustrates the wealth gap between us and our South-American cousins, to give you a bit of perspective.
At UD, a rule states that you can only put 12 people in a 15-passenger van for safety reasons. I´ve been in one that had 17 people in it before with one person sitting on the console between the driver and front passenger and another on the floor by the sliding door, but I´m not saying when or where in order to protect the guilty. I was not a decision-maker on that particular trip, so no one needs to come knocking on my door demanding an explanation. But that particular trip pales in comparison to the return trip from El Abra, when I counted 22 in the van at one point. That sets one steep record.
Anyway, the Trufi took us to El Abra, which sits in a suburb on the south outskirts of Cochabamba. Although when I say "suburb," I mean "shabby little town with dirt roads and open sewers in the streets." In an ironic reversal of American cities, the affluent of Cochabamba live downtown or close to it and the less fortunate classes live on the outskirts of the city. As a minimally related side note, some American urban planners and smart growth advocates would do well to consider this when they draw up plans for revitalizing inner cities. The point of all those plans is to create cities and communities for people and turning suburbs into the new slums in 20 or 30 years time is not what the term "sustainable development" annotates. But I digress.
We pulled up to El Abra, squeezed our way through the people standing by the taxi door like corks from a bottle, and made our way through the dusty road to visitor processing. There Fito explained to the guard on duty what our business was, which strangely enough resulted in a little small talk, and then we were searched. We then handed over our photo IDs. For Fito, this was his national identification card, for me, my UD student ID. Funny, I guess that little white card does sort of define me now. The guard wrote down Fito´s card number and for a moment I thought he was doing to write down the 8-digit code on my ID, despite the fact that it´s currently nearly 2,000 miles away from any place where it would have any meaning whatsoever.
We got our forearms stamped and were conducted inside the inner fence, and met the foreman of the prison workshop. He took us to the place where they cut and bend the sheet metal for the sides and bottom of the stove, using some very non-automated tools, like tin snips and folding presses which, incidentally, came from the Netherlands somewhere around Arnhem. Seeing all that made me happy because these tools are the ones you use to do an old-school kind of machining that isn´t dependent on complex technology and therefore doesn´t fail when a stepper motor chokes, like with some plasma cutters I know. For the whole morning, Fito and the foreman marked out the stove sides on sheet metal, cut them out with tin snips (think a second-grade skill, only cooler because the scissors are bigger and you´re cutting galvanized steel instead of 8x11) and folded the edges to stiffen them in presses.
They spent the whole morning cutting parts, leaving me largely out of it. Unfortunately, I didn´t feel assertive enough with my Spanish to cut in and I´ve never really cut sheet metal into parts before so I was afraid if I demanded to help out I´d probably screw up somewhere. In second grade I was very good at math and spelling but not the final word in precision when it comes to cutting straight lines.
In fact, I got very bored because the work took longer than expected, partly because after cutting out every single part according to the exact design specifications the foreman suddenly said that there was a problem: the folded edges on the stove sides were too narrow for screws to penetrate and had to be roughly doubled in size. I´m no machinist, but I seem to remember from my Autocad days that you can safely design a hole to be at least its own diameter away from an exterior edge and be perfectly fine when it comes to structural integrity, at least for light-load bearing applications like this. That makes a 3mm hole in a 10mm fold perfectly legit. But I wasn´t exactly making the call on this either.
So we cut new parts with new dimensions and that took the rest of the morning and then the afternoon, until 2:00 on a Saturday which is excessive by any means. We also ate lunch at the prison, which was a bad move. It led to a headache, fever, and chills in the afternoon, diagnosis by Señora Elizabeth, Bolivian host mother and default family practice physician, in the evening, and bed rest through all of Saturday night and Sunday morning. I think the screening of Spanish-dubbed episodes of Dragonball Z in the prison cantina may also have had a part in it. My compañeros asked me if we had this in the states, and I said yes. I added that it was weird because it was a Japanese TV show dubbed in Spanish, so the words didn´t fit how the mouths were moving. Then I realized it was anime and the words never fit how the mouths are moving. Then my compañeros asked me if I watched the show myself in the States. I told them no.
After lunch and a bit more work finishing the parts, we reversed the entering process and I got my trusty student ID back. Here in Bolivia it doesn´t mean much but back at UD it has served as house keys, RecPlex membership and towel collateral, and meal ticket as well as a host of other useful purposes. In a little less than two months it will be gladly back in action again.
Outside the prison we waited for the record-breaking Trufi and rode our ridiculously cheap but crowded way home. And that´s the story of how for six hours on one Saturday in June I was in a Bolivian prison.
Maximum-security prison, actually.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Aprovecho
"Aprovecho" is a colloquial saying in the Spanish language which is usually used after meals. It´s good manners, and it functions along the lines of ¨bon appetit¨or something similar. It comes from the verb aprovechar, which has no equivalent in English that I can think of. Its meaning runs somewhere along the lines of "to make good use of," or "to make the most of." It also has a negative connotation in the sense of taking advantage of something or someone, but I like the sense in which it´s used after meals much better. There´s a certain wisdom in it. Make the most of your meal. Incidentally, the leading think tank on ecological cookers of all types is named the Aprovecho Reseach Center for precisely that reason.
Aprovecho has been a sort of mantra I´ve been trying to live by while here in Bolivia. It´s about the halfway point of my time in Bolivia (5ish weeks gone, 4 more coming) and I thought I´d reflect a little on my experiences here and how I´m doing. As Charlie says in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, "I´m happy and sad at the same time and I don´t really know why."
Truth be told, this time has not been easy for me at all. I´ve been on my own away from home lots of times before. But I´ve never been truly homesick until now. At least, there are times when I very much wish I was home, because something about me just doesn´t seem to succeed here. At times, I thank God for all those years of cross-country and track running, because I think that trains in you a certain reserve of sheer will you can fall back on.
Part of it is that there are some very strong personalities around here of a kind I´m just not used to dealing with. I guess now´s as good a time as ever to learn, because it won´t be the last time in my life that strong personalities enter. Learn to deal now, or have to learn later. That´s the way of things.
Actually, as hard as it is right now this is still a good experience, having to learn to cope with situations which are not optimal and make whatever you can out of it. That skill is indispensable for an engineer, and I´ll be better for it. Also, one thing I´m trying to learn is to go into a job knowing next to nothing about what you´re supposed to be doing. Which begins a short list of crazy things I´ve done in Bolivia so far that I could never do in the states, which I hope is at least mildly entertaining.
Aprovecho has been a sort of mantra I´ve been trying to live by while here in Bolivia. It´s about the halfway point of my time in Bolivia (5ish weeks gone, 4 more coming) and I thought I´d reflect a little on my experiences here and how I´m doing. As Charlie says in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, "I´m happy and sad at the same time and I don´t really know why."
Truth be told, this time has not been easy for me at all. I´ve been on my own away from home lots of times before. But I´ve never been truly homesick until now. At least, there are times when I very much wish I was home, because something about me just doesn´t seem to succeed here. At times, I thank God for all those years of cross-country and track running, because I think that trains in you a certain reserve of sheer will you can fall back on.
Part of it is that there are some very strong personalities around here of a kind I´m just not used to dealing with. I guess now´s as good a time as ever to learn, because it won´t be the last time in my life that strong personalities enter. Learn to deal now, or have to learn later. That´s the way of things.
Actually, as hard as it is right now this is still a good experience, having to learn to cope with situations which are not optimal and make whatever you can out of it. That skill is indispensable for an engineer, and I´ll be better for it. Also, one thing I´m trying to learn is to go into a job knowing next to nothing about what you´re supposed to be doing. Which begins a short list of crazy things I´ve done in Bolivia so far that I could never do in the states, which I hope is at least mildly entertaining.
- Eat goat. This was my first demonstration, a while back around week 2 or 3. We were in a town called Bombeo and the townspeople literally set out a feast. There were chunks of a tough meat that was really heavily spiced and not really too bad. I found out later from Dave when he asked me how the goat was.
- Fish a bird out of a vat of congealed sugarcane juice. This was in Saipina at a sugar mill. My colleague Darling and I saw the bird, and she grabbed a big spoon they use to stir the cane syrup with and lifted the bird out, because the bird was covered in syrup and couldn´t fly. Incidentally, the vat was this big cast-iron bowl and very hot, so the bird was suffering. We found some water to wash the bird off with and Darling set it in the bed of a truck so the dogs wouldn´t get it. I hope that bird´s OK.
- Dig a hole through an adobe wall with a pickaxe without a handle and a machete. At the same sugar mill. The wall was 6 inches thick and ridiculously hard.
- Tow a Toyota Land Cruiser with a Ford Expedition, without a trailer hitch and using a rope instead of a chain. We were trying to get the Toyota to start.
Incidentally, I saw Prince Caspian with my host family and maybe it was the fact that I haven´t seen the states in over a month and have little to no news (though I think I heard that Obama got the Democratic nomination,) I thought it was pretty damn good. It was a subtitle movie and not dubbed so I got to hear all the actual voices, British accents and all, which was nice.
Today I got a little break from grantwriting and got to go to the workshop and help manufacture solar box cookers. So all day I was working with tools in my hands planing, sanding, and putting on primer coats. So I was glad for that. Tomorrow morning we visit the El Abra prison where some of the inmates have a business doing final assembly for rocket stoves. That should be cool I hope.
Four weeks to go, and sometimes it seems that my flight home can´t come fast enough. But then again, my host family is wonderful and there are still a lot of great experiences here. I´m still praying for the humility to hear whatever lessons are out there for me, and to make the best use of the time I´ve got left. I will miss this place a little when I leave it, especially Andrea and her family. I really have become attached to them.
Thanks to the family at home and all my friends, Stateside and abroad, whom I´ve talked to. You´ve given me words of inspiration and support that have come just when I needed them. Just knowing that people listen is enough. I came here and I won´t let you down. You can be sure of it.
Provecho,
Drew
Sunday, June 15, 2008
On a Sunday
... the title is Jimmy Eat World song. But it is Sunday, and it´s the first real down time I´ve had all week. I suppose Saipina will have to be summarized.
Last weekend, Dave, his wife Ruth, myself, and a 31-year old Bolivian engineer from Beni named Darling went on a whirlwind 4-day adventure in the campo, or countryside, east of Cocha. We lost elevation and stayed in a hotel in the town of Saipina where for several days a local named Roseli who worked in the clinic there led us around to houses of people who had bought either solar cookers or rocket stoves. Then, we interviewed these people to see how they were using the stoves, how well they functioned, etc. The surveys we conducted were from an organization called Climate Care. CEDESOL has an agreement with Climate Care for emissions trading, where the greenhouse emissions savings from the use of rocket stoves and solar cookers get sold to Climate Care to eventually enter the voluntary carbon market. The purpose of the surveys is to make sure that, in fact, people are using the stoves and therefore saving emissions. Whatever your feelings are on carbon markets, this has the potential to be an important source of funding which will permit Cedesol to keep operating.
Last week I worked on the CNC and a Grant application to Toyota. I think I know how to dial in the height control and find the correct voltages for the different materials we´re cutting. That´s good; it means the torch won´t dive into the material anymore and will maintaing the correct cutting height. Also, the Toyota grant´s due this Friday, which means I have to finish the application by the end of Monday so we can get it into the 48-hour mail to Tokyo. Luckily, it´s mostly done and only needs a few final edits.
But today is Sunday. Today is downtime. Thankfully.
La Paz from Bolivia,
Drew
Last weekend, Dave, his wife Ruth, myself, and a 31-year old Bolivian engineer from Beni named Darling went on a whirlwind 4-day adventure in the campo, or countryside, east of Cocha. We lost elevation and stayed in a hotel in the town of Saipina where for several days a local named Roseli who worked in the clinic there led us around to houses of people who had bought either solar cookers or rocket stoves. Then, we interviewed these people to see how they were using the stoves, how well they functioned, etc. The surveys we conducted were from an organization called Climate Care. CEDESOL has an agreement with Climate Care for emissions trading, where the greenhouse emissions savings from the use of rocket stoves and solar cookers get sold to Climate Care to eventually enter the voluntary carbon market. The purpose of the surveys is to make sure that, in fact, people are using the stoves and therefore saving emissions. Whatever your feelings are on carbon markets, this has the potential to be an important source of funding which will permit Cedesol to keep operating.
Last week I worked on the CNC and a Grant application to Toyota. I think I know how to dial in the height control and find the correct voltages for the different materials we´re cutting. That´s good; it means the torch won´t dive into the material anymore and will maintaing the correct cutting height. Also, the Toyota grant´s due this Friday, which means I have to finish the application by the end of Monday so we can get it into the 48-hour mail to Tokyo. Luckily, it´s mostly done and only needs a few final edits.
But today is Sunday. Today is downtime. Thankfully.
La Paz from Bolivia,
Drew
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
The CNC Saga, Part 1
I´m going to hold off on recounting the four day trip east and south to Saipina and Pasorapa, so I can tell the stories good and proper. What we did was go around conducting surveys on stove usage, and we got around 50 although I mostly just took pictures as my Spanish isn´t up to snuff. But I did call home from a phone booth and get some pretty awesome pictures. It´s the little triumphs that count.
What I want to do now is talk a little bit about the CNC plasma cutter I´ve been working with for the past two weeks. I call the story "The CNC saga" because the story is already long, is epic at least from my standpoint, and will probably have a tragic ending. I´ve been working with a Bolivian engineer to try to get this damn thing to work for two weeks, and one problem after another keeps creeping up.
CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control, which uses a programming language called G code to automatically control what a machine tool does. In this case, the machine tool is a plasma cutter, a device which uses an electric current to superheat gas into plasma and cut through sheet metal. In this case, we´re cutting through 1/16" sheets of steel to make tapas, or the tops of rocket stoves. The plasma torch is mounted on a gantry which can travel in the x and y directions on rails using stepper motors. It´s a really cool machine, actually a kind of robot in that it is a machine which does the machining that a human operator might do, only with far greater precision and speed.
In fact, robotics was the subject which got me into engineering, in idyllic days before high school when men were men, boys were boys, and you could still buy very good and cheap canned root beer at Meijer. I worked with my friends Steve and Adam in a basement, designing and building a lego robot in Steve´s basement for the FIRST Lego League competition. We carried the state of Ohio two years running. Back then we called the robot "Free Willy" because we swore it had a will of its own. It wouldn´t do anything we programmed it to do. Now, when life has carried me to Bolivia, I find those words prophetic because this robot won´t do what we tell it to. The difference is that this robot costs thirty thousand dollars and can actually kill you. The plasma torch draws 40 amps of current and generates temperatures hot enough to vaporize steel.
Where the CNC plasma cutter fits into CEDESOL´s operations is that we´re trying to industrialize the production of rocket stoves and solar ovens. The idea is to have them in just about every village in Bolivia, which was partially the motivation for the trip to Saipina. We can use the cutter to rapidly cut out metal parts for stoves, and we want to do several thousand a month. Ideally, you can program the cutter to do what you want, put sheet metal under it, press "go," and the cutter will give you twelve stove tops like cutting out cookies on a baking sheet.
However, there are always hang-ups. For one thing, when the gantry travels along the rails it has a tendency to hang up on one side, stopping momentarily. This throws the cutter navigation off so that it starts cutting the second tapa over where the first tapa should be, or starts cutting the screw holes in the wrong place. Factor in the price of sheet metal these days, lost time and energy, and these mistakes start to look very expensive. Secondly, the sheet metal doesn´t lie flat, but bubbles up in the middle. The CNC system is equipped with an automatic height control which is supposed to compensate for material bubbling by sensing the torch voltage and jogging the torch up or down, but for some reason that doesn´t work. So the torch eventually hits the material and hangs up as well. The upshot of it is is that we have a program that works cutting three tapas at a time when we should be able to cut twelve, and two of us have to baby the machine the whole way in case something goes wrong. The whole cutting process almost takes longer than it would to just cut out the tapas manually. We´ve got about ninety right now, and cut sixty yesterday, but that took all day.
Hopefully the work of the afternoon will go better we can solve the motor problem, and I can calibrate the height control to avoid the torch catching the material. Hopefully.
Hasta Luego,
Drew
What I want to do now is talk a little bit about the CNC plasma cutter I´ve been working with for the past two weeks. I call the story "The CNC saga" because the story is already long, is epic at least from my standpoint, and will probably have a tragic ending. I´ve been working with a Bolivian engineer to try to get this damn thing to work for two weeks, and one problem after another keeps creeping up.
CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control, which uses a programming language called G code to automatically control what a machine tool does. In this case, the machine tool is a plasma cutter, a device which uses an electric current to superheat gas into plasma and cut through sheet metal. In this case, we´re cutting through 1/16" sheets of steel to make tapas, or the tops of rocket stoves. The plasma torch is mounted on a gantry which can travel in the x and y directions on rails using stepper motors. It´s a really cool machine, actually a kind of robot in that it is a machine which does the machining that a human operator might do, only with far greater precision and speed.
In fact, robotics was the subject which got me into engineering, in idyllic days before high school when men were men, boys were boys, and you could still buy very good and cheap canned root beer at Meijer. I worked with my friends Steve and Adam in a basement, designing and building a lego robot in Steve´s basement for the FIRST Lego League competition. We carried the state of Ohio two years running. Back then we called the robot "Free Willy" because we swore it had a will of its own. It wouldn´t do anything we programmed it to do. Now, when life has carried me to Bolivia, I find those words prophetic because this robot won´t do what we tell it to. The difference is that this robot costs thirty thousand dollars and can actually kill you. The plasma torch draws 40 amps of current and generates temperatures hot enough to vaporize steel.
Where the CNC plasma cutter fits into CEDESOL´s operations is that we´re trying to industrialize the production of rocket stoves and solar ovens. The idea is to have them in just about every village in Bolivia, which was partially the motivation for the trip to Saipina. We can use the cutter to rapidly cut out metal parts for stoves, and we want to do several thousand a month. Ideally, you can program the cutter to do what you want, put sheet metal under it, press "go," and the cutter will give you twelve stove tops like cutting out cookies on a baking sheet.
However, there are always hang-ups. For one thing, when the gantry travels along the rails it has a tendency to hang up on one side, stopping momentarily. This throws the cutter navigation off so that it starts cutting the second tapa over where the first tapa should be, or starts cutting the screw holes in the wrong place. Factor in the price of sheet metal these days, lost time and energy, and these mistakes start to look very expensive. Secondly, the sheet metal doesn´t lie flat, but bubbles up in the middle. The CNC system is equipped with an automatic height control which is supposed to compensate for material bubbling by sensing the torch voltage and jogging the torch up or down, but for some reason that doesn´t work. So the torch eventually hits the material and hangs up as well. The upshot of it is is that we have a program that works cutting three tapas at a time when we should be able to cut twelve, and two of us have to baby the machine the whole way in case something goes wrong. The whole cutting process almost takes longer than it would to just cut out the tapas manually. We´ve got about ninety right now, and cut sixty yesterday, but that took all day.
Hopefully the work of the afternoon will go better we can solve the motor problem, and I can calibrate the height control to avoid the torch catching the material. Hopefully.
Hasta Luego,
Drew
Friday, June 6, 2008
Trip to the Campo
I´m going on a trip with Cedesol´s executive director, Dave, and some others that is supposed to last five or six days, so this might be the last post for a while. We´re going either east or north, out of the mountains and into the semi-tropical lowlands. It could be either really buggy or freezing cold, if the prevailing wind is coming from the south pole. I´ve packed to be ready for anything.
The Hitchiker´s Guide to the Galaxy says that every good hitchiker should have a towel and know where it´s at at all times. The rationale is that a towel is an item with a number of uses: blanket, tent, air filter if you put it over your face, and, if it´s still clean, a way to dry yourself off after a shower. I think there´s some sort of wisdom in that, that the ones who really have it together "know where their towels are at." Needless to say, mine´s sitting in the bottom of my backpack along with my other warm clothes and a copy of Walden.
Happy travels all of my friends abroad and happy days to my friends and family at home. Until later!
Drew
The Hitchiker´s Guide to the Galaxy says that every good hitchiker should have a towel and know where it´s at at all times. The rationale is that a towel is an item with a number of uses: blanket, tent, air filter if you put it over your face, and, if it´s still clean, a way to dry yourself off after a shower. I think there´s some sort of wisdom in that, that the ones who really have it together "know where their towels are at." Needless to say, mine´s sitting in the bottom of my backpack along with my other warm clothes and a copy of Walden.
Happy travels all of my friends abroad and happy days to my friends and family at home. Until later!
Drew
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Capinota
Much of Bolivia was once part of the Incan empire before the Spanish conquered it in the 16th century. The pattern of Spanish relations with the indigenous people was very different than that of the English in North America. Instead of killing all the natives wholesale and driving them off the land, the Spanish just impressed the ones who didn´t die from smallpox into forced labor. These encounters, as you may know, are the beginning of a long and successful history of entirely functional relations between Europeans and other cultures which continues to this day.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that a hybrid culture developed, part European, part native, in Bolivia as in other parts of the Iberian-conquered Americas. Over centuries of ethnic mixing, class division, revolutions, repressions, reforms, etc., Latin America simmered like a cultural stew. I find the music, people, and customs quite fascinating. Anyway, the upshot of that long discourse is that in Bolivia, there are actually four languages spoken: Spanish, Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Spanish, obviously, is the Latin American Spanish descended from colonial Spain. Quechua is the language of the Incan empire. Aymara is the language of the ancient indigenous kingdoms which the Incas conquered, and Guryani is the language of the tropical lowlands in the east. Take careful note, because although right now I´m going to leave you hanging, this language discussion actually is relevant to other parts of this post.
Sunday I traveled with the CEDESOL office staff to the village of Capinota, about 70 km (40 miles-ish) from Cochabamba. We also traveled with a team from the microenterprise Sobre la Roca ("Over the Rock," which is both a scriptural reference and a reference to the old three-stone cooking fire) to perform the bread and butter of distributing ecological cookstoves: demonstrations.
The point of a demonstration is to set up a bunch of stoves, cook stuff with them, feed curious onlookers with it, and then take down names as they line up to buy them. It´s slightly more complicated than that, but that´s the general idea. I helped set up one of the dual-burner rocket stoves, then helped Ruth, Dave´s wife and the owner of Sobre la Roca, make a dish called Pastel de Carne. In some parts of the world, this dish is called meatloaf. The recipe called for about a quart of ketchup and two dozen eggs, which I faithfully added to the bowl full of ground beef. Then, we separated it out into baking pans and put the Pastel de Carne into the solar box cookers we had set up around the plaza.
My next job was to hand out sheets of paper with the prices of the stoves to curious onlookers and answer any questions they asked me. Enter Drew the salesman, a job I was never particularly good at even when the clientele did speak my first language. I have never held a sales job. I sense something vaguely shady to working on commission. Luckily, I´m a volunteer so I don´t get commission, and my conscience doesn´t understand me when I speak Spanish.
About an hour into the sales session I spotted a woman looking curiously at one of the solar cookers. She was dressed in traditional campesino clothing: long dark pigtails, wide-brimmed hat, a particolored poncho and a long skirt. I went up to her, said "Perdon, señora" as politely as I could, gave her a sales sheet, and started my spiel. And I thought I was doing pretty well in Spanish with what I knew: este cocina no usa nada leña, this stove doesn´t use any firewood; usa solamente le energia del sol, it only uses the power of the sun; usualmente la comida cocina en uno y medio horas dependiente en el tipo de comida y el fuerzo del sol, usually the food cooks in 1 1/2 hours depending on the type of foor and the strength of the sun, et cetera, et cetera. I went on like this for two or three minutes, she wasn´t interrupting me with pesky questions that I didn´t have the vocabulary to answer, and I was too absorbed with forming cogent sentences in Spanish to really notice the blank look on her face. I was just about to drive my spiel home when she finally interrupted me and asked, "¿Sabes Quechua?" Do you know Quechua?
I think I froze in mid-sentence. I looked at Andrea, whom I hadn´t noticed come up. I think I looked like something that was about to be run over by a car. She looked at me, almost laughing out loud, and said, "Drew, that woman only speaks Quechua." Then she got Dora, who works at the Cedesol offices and knows Spanish and Quechua, to explain to the woman about solar cookers.
This is what I get for trying to learn Spanish.
I wasn´t the only victim of the Quechua language barrier, though. Later on, some of the people in the office were giving a presentation on the benefits of ecological cookers in Spanish in the town hall to a largely enraptured audience. The presentation was accompanied by a power point with lots of dramatic pictures, it was polished, it was professional. Andrea and I were in the courtyard outside, watching from the back because we had to take down stove orders from people going in and out. And then Andrea motioned me over and pointed to a woman slumped over in her chair, falling asleep. "She doesn´t understand a word they´re saying up there."
This is why one of the projects I´m working to secure funding for includes translators to translate educational materials on ecological cookers into Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Most often, the people who speak these indigenous languages live in the poor, remote rural areas where we go and have just the kind of problems we´re trying to help them fix. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca together have produced and distributed thousands of rocket stoves and solar cookers, but they´re trying to do more: combine the technology with education about how to manage kitchens in a sanitary way, how to use the stoves best to pasteurize water and reduce fuel expenses, and distribute more stoves. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca are smack in the middle of a process of industrial scale-up involving going from producing a few hundred stoves a month to producing over a thousand. One of our obstacles right now is the machine tool from the black lagoon, a beast CNC-controlled plasma cutter which is the machine shop equivalent, right now, of a bad-tempered donkey.
But more on that later.
Peace from Bolivia,
Drew
Anyway, the upshot of this is that a hybrid culture developed, part European, part native, in Bolivia as in other parts of the Iberian-conquered Americas. Over centuries of ethnic mixing, class division, revolutions, repressions, reforms, etc., Latin America simmered like a cultural stew. I find the music, people, and customs quite fascinating. Anyway, the upshot of that long discourse is that in Bolivia, there are actually four languages spoken: Spanish, Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Spanish, obviously, is the Latin American Spanish descended from colonial Spain. Quechua is the language of the Incan empire. Aymara is the language of the ancient indigenous kingdoms which the Incas conquered, and Guryani is the language of the tropical lowlands in the east. Take careful note, because although right now I´m going to leave you hanging, this language discussion actually is relevant to other parts of this post.
Sunday I traveled with the CEDESOL office staff to the village of Capinota, about 70 km (40 miles-ish) from Cochabamba. We also traveled with a team from the microenterprise Sobre la Roca ("Over the Rock," which is both a scriptural reference and a reference to the old three-stone cooking fire) to perform the bread and butter of distributing ecological cookstoves: demonstrations.
The point of a demonstration is to set up a bunch of stoves, cook stuff with them, feed curious onlookers with it, and then take down names as they line up to buy them. It´s slightly more complicated than that, but that´s the general idea. I helped set up one of the dual-burner rocket stoves, then helped Ruth, Dave´s wife and the owner of Sobre la Roca, make a dish called Pastel de Carne. In some parts of the world, this dish is called meatloaf. The recipe called for about a quart of ketchup and two dozen eggs, which I faithfully added to the bowl full of ground beef. Then, we separated it out into baking pans and put the Pastel de Carne into the solar box cookers we had set up around the plaza.
My next job was to hand out sheets of paper with the prices of the stoves to curious onlookers and answer any questions they asked me. Enter Drew the salesman, a job I was never particularly good at even when the clientele did speak my first language. I have never held a sales job. I sense something vaguely shady to working on commission. Luckily, I´m a volunteer so I don´t get commission, and my conscience doesn´t understand me when I speak Spanish.
About an hour into the sales session I spotted a woman looking curiously at one of the solar cookers. She was dressed in traditional campesino clothing: long dark pigtails, wide-brimmed hat, a particolored poncho and a long skirt. I went up to her, said "Perdon, señora" as politely as I could, gave her a sales sheet, and started my spiel. And I thought I was doing pretty well in Spanish with what I knew: este cocina no usa nada leña, this stove doesn´t use any firewood; usa solamente le energia del sol, it only uses the power of the sun; usualmente la comida cocina en uno y medio horas dependiente en el tipo de comida y el fuerzo del sol, usually the food cooks in 1 1/2 hours depending on the type of foor and the strength of the sun, et cetera, et cetera. I went on like this for two or three minutes, she wasn´t interrupting me with pesky questions that I didn´t have the vocabulary to answer, and I was too absorbed with forming cogent sentences in Spanish to really notice the blank look on her face. I was just about to drive my spiel home when she finally interrupted me and asked, "¿Sabes Quechua?" Do you know Quechua?
I think I froze in mid-sentence. I looked at Andrea, whom I hadn´t noticed come up. I think I looked like something that was about to be run over by a car. She looked at me, almost laughing out loud, and said, "Drew, that woman only speaks Quechua." Then she got Dora, who works at the Cedesol offices and knows Spanish and Quechua, to explain to the woman about solar cookers.
This is what I get for trying to learn Spanish.
I wasn´t the only victim of the Quechua language barrier, though. Later on, some of the people in the office were giving a presentation on the benefits of ecological cookers in Spanish in the town hall to a largely enraptured audience. The presentation was accompanied by a power point with lots of dramatic pictures, it was polished, it was professional. Andrea and I were in the courtyard outside, watching from the back because we had to take down stove orders from people going in and out. And then Andrea motioned me over and pointed to a woman slumped over in her chair, falling asleep. "She doesn´t understand a word they´re saying up there."
This is why one of the projects I´m working to secure funding for includes translators to translate educational materials on ecological cookers into Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Most often, the people who speak these indigenous languages live in the poor, remote rural areas where we go and have just the kind of problems we´re trying to help them fix. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca together have produced and distributed thousands of rocket stoves and solar cookers, but they´re trying to do more: combine the technology with education about how to manage kitchens in a sanitary way, how to use the stoves best to pasteurize water and reduce fuel expenses, and distribute more stoves. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca are smack in the middle of a process of industrial scale-up involving going from producing a few hundred stoves a month to producing over a thousand. One of our obstacles right now is the machine tool from the black lagoon, a beast CNC-controlled plasma cutter which is the machine shop equivalent, right now, of a bad-tempered donkey.
But more on that later.
Peace from Bolivia,
Drew
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