Upgrade at Laparua was a success!

Carl and I finished the power equipment upgrade today at Laparua primary school. Everything went very smooth but it took a lot of time and hard work. We added additional equipment to support more evening classes for the children. They are now splitting the library into 2 areas so they can have a study area and a classroom. We also learned that the community has begun to use the library to hold important village meetings. We are off tomorrow to site plan Karimba school which we hope to complete by the fall.

Thank you everyone for all the great emails supporting our efforts.

John
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Ndare Ngare Cleanup

Today we took a break from working on power to help a local community pick up plastic and trash. The local school children were part of the education program to help them understand the value of throwing trash away properly. We spent the morning helping organize and photograph the event. We collected 20 bags of trash around the school and town. The children have only experienced throwing trash on the ground with no regard to the environment. We picked up plastic, paper, metal, shoes, and batteries to be recycled.

Hopefully this will be the start of a new program on the area. It will be hard to change what is now ingrained into them. When we finished cleaning the area, we handed a water bottle to one of the organizers and he opened the bottle and threw the lid on the ground. It was indicative of the challenge ahead. After we all jump on him and scolded him for what he did, I doubt he will do it again.

John

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Great Help!

We spent the day working at Leparua school reconfiguring and expanding the power system. It was a long day of work and 4x4ing but we accomplished a lot. We were lucky enough to be assisted be two Italian volunteer teachers living in the local village. Olmo and Olivia have been working at the school for several months and have been using the power to teach children in the evening and also teach them basic computer skills during the day. Amazingly, Olmo and Olivia found about the school when they were searching the web for poverty education programs and their searches brought up our web site and the school. Once they saw all the pictures online and realized the school had solar power they new it was a perfect fit for their skills.

I love this story...John
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Working to Support Mt Kenya Wildlife

Carl and I were recruited by our friends at Lewa to help support a major mountain bike race that raises money to protect Mt Kenya Wildlife. A group of us were sent out into the bush to hand out water and give directions to riders. There was a lot of confusion around the race and all the water stops. We had to send one group right and the other left...we did pretty good after about the first 20 riders. Sadly, the first 20 were the top international riders and we may have sent them in the wrong direction. Lucky for us we did not see them again! John
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Save the Rhino

On my plane ride into LEWA I met a woman who handles fund raising for Save the Rhino International. She was on her to Borona Ranch which is adjacent to the area we are working in. Borona Ranch is interested in opening part of their ranch to support the protection of Rhino which are endangered. She is there to determine the feasibility of the project and to see how Save the Rhino International can help financially.

Check out their web site at www.savetherhino.org

John
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Drought at LEWA

Arriving to LEWA we got to see first hand the current drought and the effect that it has had on the animals and landscape. Fires are burning on and around Mt Kenya and water can only be found in streams which are fed by springs. The photo shows how grey and burnt the grasslands are which are of no nutritional value to animals for food. Rains are not expected for a few more months. John
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View from the Air

This a photo I took when we left Wilson Airport near Nairobi. It is of one of many slums in the area and if you look in the background you can see the contrast between the slum and new development. This contrast is occurring all over Nairobi.

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In Nairobi

We arrived into Nairobi late last night and spent the day running errands and scheduling meetings. We had a wonderful dinner tonight with our friends at Tropical Ice Safari. They handle all of our East Africa travel arrangements and scheduling. Their support has been instrumental in getting things done for the foundation. They just launched a new web site showing all of their trips and adventures so please check it out. The link is on the right hand side of the blog. We fly out tomorrow on a bush plane to start working at Lewa. Wish us luck...

John
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We are heading back!

We finally have more equipment on its way and we will be back at Leparua school to expand the power system and learn more about how it is being used first hand. We then will be off the Karimba school for site preparation (we will be installing in August 2011). While the process of getting more equipment to Leparua has taken longer than we had hoped, the learning process has been amazing and we now understand better how power will be used in these remote environments. By the time we do Karimba school in August, we will have a packaged power system we can replicate to more schools in 2012. We are just at the beginning of this journey but the momentum is starting to build.
Thank you for all the support - John

Equals3 Foundation is Official

We have finally completed the necessary paperwork to form Equals3 Foundation. It has been on our to-do-list for awhile but so many other project requests got in the way. This past week we also filed our federal IRS paperwork to make the foundation a tax exempt organization (501c3). Hopefully, in the next several months we will receive our IRS acceptance letter and be able to accept tax exempt donations. Thank you to everyone involved for all the support on this. - John

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