David and Evelyn

I have been asked how David and Evelyn are doing. I would like to give you all a quick up date. David is finishing his last dose of injectable medicine and will start the daily pills in Jan. He is very excited to see the end of the injections with the excessive tiredness after each injection.
The picture shows David and his family before the baby Moses. His kids are named Jonathon, born Sept 11 2001, Lilian, Samuel, and now Moses. Each baby is given a white / Christian name and then a Maasai name. Jonathon and Lilian are in school and Samuel is still at home.
David's house is coming along nicely as well. We have most of the tin on the roof and I bought some ridge caps for the ridge of the roof. We are waiting for them to arrive from Narok. During this wait, I have had my guys patching the holes that are at the top of the wall and in the walls from the forms. Today we started cleaning floors and getting ready to plaster the walls. There are some photos of this in the photo gallery.
Keep them in you prayers as they struggle to get there life started again after this latest bout of depression. God has been good and we are thankful to know them and be able to help them.

Pulling the Cab; a busy day

This last week has been incredibly busy. Today alone we pulled the cab off the old frame and removed the engine. This should be enough for any day but I had workers finishing David's tin roof and another two putting lock sets in the doors I rebuilt yesterday for the hospital. When the door came for the hospital, 10 of them were a different length. To get the doors into the their frame we had to take them apart, cut the slates individually, regroove the side posts and put them together again. Today we added the locks and hung them after lunch, after pulling the cab and before we pulled the engine.

Of course no day is compete without its normal items. Liddia, David's step daughter was up visiting until lunch, and the Elder Kadia came by to ask for help as his wife's foot was badly infected. Ruth the Swahili teacher is trying to work with all of us, but has yet to catch me as I am playing hooky. Josh is also having a difficult time concentrating as this job is a boys dream come true. Thankfully God gives us the strength we need for each day.

Second Attempt

On the second attempt I figured I had mastered the physics of this situation. We shortened the over all length by lowering the pivot point on the base. This increased our leverage a lot. We also added a push pole so that we could have some guys on the back side pushing it up as well as on the pole. Because I saw it was a much larger wind turbine, we added more tie downs on the roof to help hold it steady and I was ready for the big day. On the last Fri. of Nov. I found that we had indeed mastered the geometry needed to get the turbine up in the air as it went up without any trouble, but Murphy was still near by. As the wind picked up the pole started to shimmer and shake. As we watched it started to bow almost a foot in middle in either direction. It gives you a whole new appreciation for wind power to watch a two inch heavy gauge pole flex what appeared to be 24 inches and vibrate the whole roof. So attempt two looks even better than one, but the turbine is still shut down. Attempt three is coming up as I ordered a 4 inch pole and hope to get it up over Christmas. Thanks for keeping this in your prayers. The best news to date, is that no one has fallen off my roof yet. LOL

First Attempt

Sometimes it is easy to forget where you are. Here in Africa if you can't do something you just call for some friends and get some help. It is not unusual to see ten to one hundred people working together to stand a large tower up, or to pull several miles of cable. There is strength in numbers.

Unfortunately, there are several laws of physics that always apply. When you put a heavy weight on a long pole, add to that a high roof and poor footings, and the result is that we found that even with all our help, it just wasn't possible to stand this new wind turbine up.

This turbine is an ARI 750 watt wind turbine. That means we should see from 15 to 25 Amps out of it on a regular basis. This is over 3 times what I was seeing on the older, smaller wind turbine. We are looking forward to the added power as we are still having to run a small generator daily to do the work we would like to do. We are hoping that with this turbine and a tilting solar rack to reach the point that our electricity is self sustaining. This was attempt one somewhere in the middle of Nov. 2008.