Hey team,
I wanted to fill everybody in on what's going on with the group.
1. We decided meetings should now be held at Dr. Wilkie's office from 4 till whenever. Over the summer we are only going to be able to get there on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays due to class schedules. We decided to make this our default meeting location so Wilkie can be filled in on the things we are doing quicker and she can feel more part of the team.
2. David, Jon and I are going to start construction on an efficient stove on Wednesday of next week. We are going to mainly use clay since it is abundant in the villages. We are basically making a column with a tight fitting hole at the top for the pot and a small hole at the bottom side for wood. After we make the base efficient stove and see that it is an improvement over the three-stove fire, we are going to improve the design. Starting with this basic design will help us know how to work with clay and to understand some basic principles on creating an ideal efficient stove for Cambodian villagers.
3. We are having out meeting with our project manager, Joshua Knight, next week about our assessment trip. We made our time slots for either Thursday June 3 or Wednesday June 2. We are going to meet one or two times after the weekend to make sure the whole team is on the same page.
4. David is borrowing Jon's copy of the down to earth biogas handbook. He'll be reading it over the weekend and passing to me the notes he writes down from the book. Hopefully we can start some biogas digester construction as soon as possible.
Things that still need to be done:
1. Create educational hand outs
2. Buy tickets as soon as we get approval for the trip
3. members need to get their vaccinations
Comment if there is anything else to add!
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Summary of Soknay's Reply to our Questions
Cooking:
Soknay Sorn (Sustainable Cambodia's National Coordinator) wrote back to us, answering the questions that we asked. In summary, the Cambodian villagers are suffering from a variety of health problems resulting from smoke inhalation from the use of inefficient cook-stoves. These include skin and respiratory diseases, eye damage, and increased susceptibility to influenza and TB. Cooking is done on a traditional 3-stone support for a pot, or an improved clay stove available at the market. The most commonly used cooking containers are 30x25cm aluminum pots used to boil water for drinking, and cook rice and soup. There is the possibility of needing to grill food at one point, but it sounds like an occasional practice. We didn’t get a really clear answer on the quantity of wood used, and need to clarify (“At lease the cook used 8-12 pieces of wood for this 3 times cooking. Each piece should not be less then 40cm long and the diameter about 0.03cm.” Not sure if this is for each meal, and if the wood is really 3/10 of a millimeter in diameter?!)
For this reason, I recommend that we design or choose an efficient stove and biogas burner optimized for boiling large quantities of water… i.e. strong consistent heat supply over a relatively small footprint.
One possible setback to digestion is the fact that, culturally, cooking is done by each family unit independently, while most families have less than two large mammals (cattle, buffalo, or swine). Space doesn’t seem to be a problem for the digester, and clay sounds like the material of choice for the stove.
Water/Health:
The villagers, for the most part, rely on over the counter medication and traditional medicine for health problems. There are cases of water-bourne diseases. Ninety percent of the population drinks untreated water from the source (usually surface water), but some is obtained by boiling or treating with a biosand filter. We asked them about the bathrooms, which may have been a mistake in semantics… I believe we wanted to know information about “latrines”. Also, the villages conserve resources, and no food is wasted. But perhaps in the city there is a bit more organic waste that could run the digester at the school.
There seems to be a bit of room to help advise some BMP’s for their agricultural methods, i.e. increasing the use of mulches would cut down on water need and wouldn’t be too hard to implement.
It sounds like there won’t be any problems with cultural clashes, and we’ll be taken care of. Apparently some western volunteers get malaria medication, while others don’t do any vaccinations. (TB might be a good one to get…) The answer about car rental was a little unclear, it appears that it may cost $35/day for a car and $60/day for a minibus.
Feel free to comment if I didn't summarize something well, or if you have any input!
-Jon
Soknay Sorn (Sustainable Cambodia's National Coordinator) wrote back to us, answering the questions that we asked. In summary, the Cambodian villagers are suffering from a variety of health problems resulting from smoke inhalation from the use of inefficient cook-stoves. These include skin and respiratory diseases, eye damage, and increased susceptibility to influenza and TB. Cooking is done on a traditional 3-stone support for a pot, or an improved clay stove available at the market. The most commonly used cooking containers are 30x25cm aluminum pots used to boil water for drinking, and cook rice and soup. There is the possibility of needing to grill food at one point, but it sounds like an occasional practice. We didn’t get a really clear answer on the quantity of wood used, and need to clarify (“At lease the cook used 8-12 pieces of wood for this 3 times cooking. Each piece should not be less then 40cm long and the diameter about 0.03cm.” Not sure if this is for each meal, and if the wood is really 3/10 of a millimeter in diameter?!)
For this reason, I recommend that we design or choose an efficient stove and biogas burner optimized for boiling large quantities of water… i.e. strong consistent heat supply over a relatively small footprint.
One possible setback to digestion is the fact that, culturally, cooking is done by each family unit independently, while most families have less than two large mammals (cattle, buffalo, or swine). Space doesn’t seem to be a problem for the digester, and clay sounds like the material of choice for the stove.
Water/Health:
The villagers, for the most part, rely on over the counter medication and traditional medicine for health problems. There are cases of water-bourne diseases. Ninety percent of the population drinks untreated water from the source (usually surface water), but some is obtained by boiling or treating with a biosand filter. We asked them about the bathrooms, which may have been a mistake in semantics… I believe we wanted to know information about “latrines”. Also, the villages conserve resources, and no food is wasted. But perhaps in the city there is a bit more organic waste that could run the digester at the school.
There seems to be a bit of room to help advise some BMP’s for their agricultural methods, i.e. increasing the use of mulches would cut down on water need and wouldn’t be too hard to implement.
It sounds like there won’t be any problems with cultural clashes, and we’ll be taken care of. Apparently some western volunteers get malaria medication, while others don’t do any vaccinations. (TB might be a good one to get…) The answer about car rental was a little unclear, it appears that it may cost $35/day for a car and $60/day for a minibus.
Feel free to comment if I didn't summarize something well, or if you have any input!
-Jon
Sunday, May 16, 2010
New Blog!
Hey team,
From a suggestion from Wilkie, I decided to start this blog for the group. We should always post anything we do with the group. Post when you call any important EWB contacts and what was said during the phone conversation. Also if you do any independent research let everybody know. Just type everything that is going with the group so everybody can be up to date. I think I linked it so everybody gets a notification when somebody writes a post.
For everybody out of town, David and I are sending out the pre-assessment trip form out tonight to EWB-USA. First we are sending it to Lindner and Mark for review and then sending it off. It'd be great if you could read everything over also. We've been working really hard this whole week so it'd be nice if we could make it as good as we can before we send it in.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Sarah Grace Katz
From a suggestion from Wilkie, I decided to start this blog for the group. We should always post anything we do with the group. Post when you call any important EWB contacts and what was said during the phone conversation. Also if you do any independent research let everybody know. Just type everything that is going with the group so everybody can be up to date. I think I linked it so everybody gets a notification when somebody writes a post.
For everybody out of town, David and I are sending out the pre-assessment trip form out tonight to EWB-USA. First we are sending it to Lindner and Mark for review and then sending it off. It'd be great if you could read everything over also. We've been working really hard this whole week so it'd be nice if we could make it as good as we can before we send it in.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Sarah Grace Katz
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