Yesterday, Team Sherifa returned from Bamvim where we spent the day working with our three entrepreneurs on installing the solar system. This included mounting the two solar panels to custom built metal poles, stringing the wires throughout the center and grounding the entire system with a copper pole and mixture of charcoal, salt and water. Our installation was a great success! We were able to charge Laura’s iPhone (for a fee of 50 peswas.) We discussed and finalized the prices for charging batteries (30 peswas) and cellphones (50 peswas.) Today, we painted the wood on the exterior of the solar center blue, at the request of our entrepreneurs. Anita and Laura went over the process for cleaning the solar panels and how to properly care for the genset.

This included reminding the women to always turn off the system at night, unplug all powerstrips and chargers and being sure to not overload the system with too many chargers. Meanwhile, Jack and Yanshu walked around and began to distribute lanterns to families. Our village consists of 25 households, each with roughly eight members. Every household is receiving a lantern at the cost of one Ghana Cedi. Today, we were able to give out seven lanterns and hope to finish distributing the other 18 tomorrow! We will also review the process of charging and installing the batteries for the lanterns with our entrepreneurs. We are hoping our day will go smoothly, and that we won’t get another flat tire!

– Anita, Sherifa, Yanshu, Jack and Laura