Schools' Solar Power – Last Update?

Firstly, our apologies for not posting very often lately, but our departure from Eritrea is coming up very fast now and we have a lot to do to finish up work and get round to seeing people before we leave.

Solar panels at a school

The remote schools' solar power project is still running and, in the past few weeks, there has been a day-long workshop and a few days'-worth of teaching labs to get some of the participants from the the schools in phase 2 of the project together for a while.

From a personal point of view, a very interesting few days as school staff from some far-flung corners came to Asmara for the occasion and among them were representatives of Eritrea's other ethnic groups (Tigre, Saho and Afar for example). All were very enthusiastic about the project which introduces computer technology into some very remote spots for the first time and I got my usual kick out of teaching one or two people who had never used a computer before.

Due to VSO's departure from Eritrea next year, the project has had to be curtailed somewhat since the major donor was no longer prepared to commit funds for the third year without VSO's presence. However, other donors have held firm, with the result that 21 schools out of 25 originally projected to receive equipment will do so by the project's new end date of June / July 2010.

It may seem odd to use solar power in this way (as opposed to supplying basic needs) but solar power is often already present for pumping water and serving medical centres and local communities do see their children getting a helping-hand in the use of technology as being very important. The MoE for its part is viewing the whole project as a start-point for wider introduction of panels.

In this part of the world distributed power-generation by means of the sun makes perfect sense and should become the norm ... but it takes time and capital investment so there is a long way to go. When the generation technology eventually meets up with ultra-low power devices we'll see some real progress.

Eid Al-Adha and Nigdet Asmara

A couple of weekends ago there were a couple of holidays starting with the Muslim Eid Al-Adha and continuing on with saints' days for the Zoba Maekel region (nick named Nigdet Asmara). Unsurprisingly it's a matter of visiting the houses of friends and family and consuming various quantities of injera with meat (in our case we had zigni and dulot on Saturday). As usual it wasn't a good time to be a goat or sheep and the baa'ing which was coming from the next compound (there is a Muslim family living next door) soon stopped come Friday.

P