Internet

 The farm needs internet. For accounting, research, communication, grid management and entertainment in the evenings. I've been working on building the farm's internet structure from routers and antennas that I've collected or found. It's a bit of a hodgepodge but it works and it's a relatively cheap system.

Lately, the number of people using the closest cell phone tower has grown, and the bandwidth has shrunk. So we needed to find a new solution. One of our teammates knows a guy in Mbour who has a fiber optic internet connection, and hooked a long-range antenna up on his four story building. We tried connecting another antenna from the top of the water tower, but the signal was too weak for a stable connection. 

 I spent about a month collecting materials and piecing together a 20 foot antenna to put on top of the water tower to give us a bit more clearance and a better signal.

It worked! After some careful alignment, we have a pretty stable signal over an 11-mile wireless link. And don't worry, I used training from Army to make a modified Swiss seat from a piece of rope so I could hook in and use both hands. 

Part of the reason for expanding the internet around the farm is to be able to monitor and control equipment. Before I started nerding out on wifi relays, someone would have to walk 1/2 mile to each bore-hole and turn on the pump manually every morning at 7am. Lame. 

So I moved us into the 21st century, and installed a few wifi-enabled microcontrollers to control the pumps. They turn on and off based on the time, and have manual override switches and can be remotely operated. The best part is, they only cost about $5.

This one has a battery backup, so it's $8.

I've moved on to collecting weather data and monitoring the solar grid through a centralized server that makes pretty graphs.

That humidity line hovering around 80% is not ok.

Around 6pm, I change antenna orientation...

Unfortunately, I'm all alone in my nerdery here. For some reason, everyone's eyes glaze over when I start talking about how I fixed a problem with the DHCP server because one of the hostnames had a non-ASCII character in it, which was crashing the dnsmasq service.

(A)

Passion fruit

I've been growing a passion fruit vine on the side of our house for about a year and it's done a good job of shading most of the wall, but a poor job of producing delicious fruit for us. That's because it's the yellow variety (common here in Senegal), which is not self-fertile, so you need two genetically different plants to swap pollen. Easy enough if you have a source of seed.

Taken at the beginning of rainy season

 

There are other options. You can grow the purple variety which is preferred in most of the world due to less acidity and better flavor. Purple flowers will self-pollinate. Or you can graft purple onto yellow to take advantage of yellow's disease/pest resistance. 

I'm trying all three. I have a purple vine which just flowered last month and has nine large fruit maturing. 

 

 I am rooting out about 30 cuttings from the yellow vine onto which I will graft purple and see how that goes. I also got the yellow vine to accept purple pollen and make a fruit (which the internet seems to think is not possible) and I'll plant out the resulting hybrid seeds to see what comes of it.

Ask me about my mango seedlings next time.

(A)

 

Tabaski

It’s the time of year in Senegal where we start seeing loads of sheep for sale on most busy corners in town. They’re usually kept under a white pop-up shade tent to keep them out of the blazing sun. Or they’re stuffed onto roof racks of taxis or a whole herd of them are on top of buses, with the driver hoping he secured them enough for the bumpy roads.

When you think “sheep,” you probably picture a plump, wooly creature. Here, we have short-haired sheep and they are somewhat difficult to tell apart from goats. We’ve learned that if the tail sticks up in the air, it’s a goat; if it falls downward, it’s a sheep. Sheep are more valuable and have nicer meat than goats. The price of an average sheep once it’s ready to slaughter is between 1 month’s labor (minimum wage) up to 4 month’s labor for a 3-year-old ram.

Why all the sheep? It’s the biggest feast of the year on Friday: Tabaski. The holiday celebrates Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Ishmael (not Isaac), when an angel stopped him from killing his son and a ram was killed instead. It falls at the end of the Islamic calendar year so it changes each year based on the lunar cycle. The feast usually lasts 2-4 days and each family is expected to buy and slaughter their own sheep. Can you imagine spending $8,000 dollars on a holiday meal (if you make $2000 per month)?  Along with an expensive meal, it’s normal to have new clothes made for the whole family, buy new shoes for the kids, have your hair braided, give monetary gifts to the poor, and if you live far away from family, send money. Markets and street corners start getting busy a good month before the actual holiday. (Think Black Friday until Dec 24^th.)

Tabaski is the day to offer forgiveness and accept forgiveness from everyone you know. The greeting on the street and in homes is different that day. Effectively, instead of “Hello, how are you?” it’s “Hello, how are you? Forgive me.”  I’ve asked a couple Senegalese friends what this forgiveness looks/feels like in their homes. The answer I’ve gotten is that it’s not real forgiveness. “People say they forgive, but then by the end of the meal they are fighting with each other or gossiping about a family member.”

And what does this holiday mean for the large number of Senegalese who are living hand to mouth each day? It means that when my friend’s father calls from the big city and says, “Why haven’t you sent me money for Tabaski?” she has to repeatedly lie and say that she will do her best to find money to send him, knowing she’ll have to choose to either send the $4 that she gets that day to her father, or choose to feed her kids. Choosing the latter causes her to lose family honor and connection, and makes her less able to call on her father or siblings in the future if she is in desperate need of money. She also feels shame for not being able to celebrate the holiday as she should, with new clothes, fancy hair and a nice fat sheep. Year after year her relational poverty leads her deeper into physical poverty, and vice versa.

Perhaps her only hope is that on the day of the holiday, she can call up her father and ask forgiveness, and at least he has to say he forgives her.

What would it look like to be transformed by a greater sacrifice, Jesus, who went up the mountain in submission to his Father and gave his own life for the forgiveness of all who would believe in him? Would the forgiveness translate into grace for family members and care for those less fortunate (without expecting something back)?   

(J)

Farm projects

I have been busy at the farm on a number of things the last six months.  One of my primary projects is getting up to speed on the solar grid system that was installed by a Dutch teammate who is only around every few months. There has been a historical lack of oversight and on-the-ground expertise to troubleshoot and manage power usage, and as the resident computer nerd, that task has fallen to me. That means planning new solar panel installation, setting up solar panel cleaning procedures (at its thickest, the dust cuts production by over 40%!), automating pump timing and adjusting parameters as needed.

Before on the right, after on the left.

Used a fan dial to allow manual operation if desired, and used a $3 eBay circuit board powered from a 5v USB adapter (clock is maintained by a coin cell) to turn the relay on and off. 

It's been fun to get a crash course in a whole lot of new equipment. I've worked on the following:

1) Timer controlled relays to manage motor controllers for pumps
2) Frequency derating for solar inverters to allow excess solar power to be properly controlled

I was also tasked with setting up internet at the farm. Recently, a 4G tower was put into operation a few kilometers away, and I discovered we could get fairly fast internet on top of the water tower. From there, I learned more about point-to-point 802.11n bridges, subnet masking and port forwarding, and have cobbled together a fairly reliable wireless network that provides internet access to 6 different areas on the farm, and automatically controls data usage through a quota system (using free software!)

When COVID-19 became serious, I was asked to adapt the concept of tippy-taps (touchless hand washing) to our local context. An afternoon of trial and error led to a cheap and effective solution using easily obtained materials. A set of two tippy-taps (one for soap, and one for water) costs less than $2. Through a gofundme type website in France, Beer Sheba was given around 10,000 euro to use for COVID-19 relief, and part of that was used to supply over 400 tippy-tap wash stations to families in villages around the farm. We organized the production and distribution of over 20,000 masks and many kilos of moringa powder (to support the nutrition/immune systems of elderly villagers).

Tippy taps using 13¢ bottles, 17¢ foot pedals, 38¢ string, 5¢ rebar. 

I was amazed at the generosity of folks wanting to support relief efforts here when there was so much need in their own countries.

There's a lot more happening, but will have to wait for the next post (hopefully sooner than two years from now)

(A)

Traffic

We've been asked by a few people here what are our most liked and least liked things about France. One of my negative things is the shopping carts. Here (and in Italy, and probably everywhere in Europe) all four wheels turn. Thus moving your carts around the store is quite difficult and tiring. It also doesn't make any sense (to me). And the French folks we've talked to have agreed that it's ridiculous and they hate it. How hard is it to lock the back two wheels?

File under #firstworldproblems

One of my favorite things is the use of roundabouts. I've mentioned it before, but in most (not all) non-highway situations, roundabouts are WAY more efficient in moving traffic through an intersection than traffic lights. Here's a youtube video that simulates a number of traffic flow solutions and gives an average throughput by type. Very interesting. On a typical four lane road, a large roundabout beats a regular traffic light by 44.7%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yITr127KZtQ

Cost savings vs traffic light systems are also significant. My thorough research on the cost to install (read: I googled it for 30 seconds) indicates that one intersection costs about $250,000-$300,000 from start to finish and then about $8,000 per year in electricity and maintenance. A roundabout has none of this.

Roundabouts aren't perfect though. Once traffic density reaches a certain point, it feels (can't prove it) like throughput decreases because the intersection is obstructed more often.

Baobabs

On our first visit to Senegal, we heard stories about baobabs and how linked they are to the spirit world. A common belief is that each baobab hosts one spirit, which can either be benevolent or malevolent. Baobabs that host particularly malevolent spirits are completely left alone, resulting in the beautiful spreading nature of the tree in the following picture.

Some day I'll take a pic with me underneath so you can understand how massive it is.

Other baobabs are pruned for grazing animals at the end of the dry season, since everything else is gone at that point and baobabs somehow know to push out new growth in anticipation of the rainy season. They look more like this:

An interesting look in its own right...

During sunrise and sunset, so I was told, the spirits are particularly active, and nobody goes near the trees. Children are especially at risk. But from 9am to noon you can send your 14 year old to prune branches with not a care in the world!

I would start crying after the first 10 feet.

When a spirit decides to leave a baobab, I was told, the tree collapses. Often, there is no visible signal that collapse is about to occur, and then in the span of a few weeks, branches fall and the trunk splits. And since baobabs are technically soft-tissue plants (not trees) they don't have a whole lot of strength. It makes me curious if a collapse has ever been captured on video. Collapse is rare (baobabs live many hundreds of years), so it's an event worthy of interest in the surrounding community. For many, it means the spirit decided to leave, and that raises the dual questions of 1. Where did it go? and 2. What did the farmer do whose land the baobab was on?

Our teammates Jo and Ma bought some land near Beer Sheba recently, and on that land was a large baobab. Each evening after they finished work on their plot, Jo and Ma would sit under the baobab and pray for their land. But a few months ago, they noticed that branches were falling off the tree. A few weeks later they came out to the land and saw that it had completely collapsed.

There's still a little bit of shade.

An interesting event that carries a lot of significance in the surrounding villages.

(A)

p.s. Baobabs are really neat trees, I'll probably do more posts about rope-making, fruit, growth habits, the hollow interiors, etc.

Visit

We took a little trip over our winter break to visit my brother and his family in the middle east. It was interesting for me to look at the plants growing in and around the city.  Especially the wild stuff.  Plant nerd stuff follows:

A huge, healthy Moringa oleifera tree behind the bathrooms at a local museum. I have never seen one this big, so I have no idea how old it is.

My assumption is that the roots have found their way into the waste stream of the bathrooms, because most other M. oleifera in the area are not simultaneously putting out dark green leaves, flowers and seed pods all at once.

There were some exceptionally long pods on the tree.

Huge numbers of flowers.

There were a bunch of shining sunbirds (Cinnyris habessinicus) drinking nectar out of the flowers.

Thorn mimosa (Vacellia nilotica) at the same museum.  Incredibly thorny, nitrogen fixer. One of a few trees that produce gum arabic.

Lignum-vitae (Guaiacum officinale). Ornamental that is planted all over the city.  Interesting fact, the wood is denser than water and will sink.

Mmm, plants.

Side note, apparently in northwest France, spring begins in late January.  Daffodils and crocuses are coming up and bushes are pushing out new leaves. Spring in this part of France is as long as summer in Nashville. Brassicas do incredibly well.

(A)