China

After I got back from Ghana Tim went to China for one of his classes. It was a China Megastructures class and they studied about some of the big skyscrapers, bridges, and dams in China and went to see them and meet with engineers, architects, etc. Here's some pictures from his trip. I don't know where they are (and Tim won't write a post) so here's just the pictures.

Great Wall of China.

Three Gorges DamProbably the only time in his life Tim will wear a hard hat. Ironic that I wear one everyday and he probably never will after this trip. This is some big bridge that is both a suspension bridge and cable-stayed bridge.
On some cable car going up a steap hill.
Okay, maybe he wore a hard hat twice. This is on the 100th floor of an unfinished building, around 490 meters up.
Hong Kong Temple. It was closed for cleaning.
Beijing I think.

Bird's nest (stadium for the 2008 Olympics).

Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square.

Ghana - Lydia and Kweku

In preparation for this trip we have been working with an engineer in Ghana named Kweku. He and his wife Lydia are two of the most amazing people you could ever meet. Kweku is in real estate in Ghana but owns his own engineering company that mainly does humanitarian engineering. He doesn't make much of a profit from his engineering company but runs it to help people less fortunate than himself.

Lydia is the human resources manager for the Africa West Area for the church. She recently started her own school (preschool to 6th grade). She bought a big house on a very large plot of land and completely renovated it for her school. Although it is a private school and most students pay tuition, it isn't nearly money enough to sustain the school. Until she can find benefactors who will help make up the money for the school she pays for the expenses out of her own pocket. She started the school because she sees how bad many of the schools are and wanted to start a good, affordable school where children can get a good education.

She had about 40 chairs and 20 tables for the school she ordered from Ikea months ago but hadn't had the time to put them together. We spent a Sunday afternoon putting them all together. Them we carried as much as we could from their house to the school.

Kweku and Lydia are very wealthy in Ghana, but do all they can to help others. It's really admirable the things they do to help others. The world really needs more people like them.

Ghana - Minya

About a year ago a Capstone group from BYU designed a merry-go-round that charges electric lanterns for schools in Ghana so children can use them to do their school work at night. Our EWB group went to one of these schools in a little village called Minya to implement the windmill project. This windmill will supplement the lanterns that are charged when the children use the merry-go-round. The windmill was a huge success and will work very well because it doesn't require human effort and can charge lanterns at all times of the day (when it is windy of course).
It was really sobering when we went to Minya. The people there have no electricity and live in mud huts with thatch roofs. Many of the children didn't have a lot of clothes and none had shoes. It was obvious that they wore their clothes until they couldn't wear them anymore. The school was really tiny and you could tell they crammed as many kids as possible into each classroom. Here's a picture of a typical home and one of the 3 classrooms at the school.
The children were on vacation from school that week, but a group of them saw us coming down the road in our van and came to see what the excitement was about. They watched us put up the windmill and we talked to the older ones about how it works. We wanted to play soccer with them, but no one in the village owned a soccer ball, so I got 2 empty concrete bags, rolled them into a ball and tapped it together with masking tape and we challenged them to a game. It was so much fun! The kids were really good too, and it kind of broke the ice between us and them. They were a little reserved before we started playing but after we started they were really friendly and open with us and showed us some of their games they play for fun. While we were playing Dr. Lewis drove back to the nearest village and bought 3 soccer balls to give them. They were so happy, it was like they received the best present ever. Here's a few pictures from our soccer game.
They also loved our cameras. At first they didn't really know what to do when we'd take a picture, but after we started showing them the pictures they would pose and act it up for the cameras. I was trying to teach a group of small kids how to take pictures. I would take a picture of them, then they would swarm me to see it, want to take another picture, and it would keep on going. Real cute kids though, there were two little boys that I just wanted to take home with me, they were so cute.

Being in Ghana, but Minya especially really made me appreciate the things we have. In Minya they don't have anything except the bare neccesities. The kids have no toys, there's no electricity, and not much food or water either. There was a big water tank near the school that had a small leak and there were some kids trying to lick up all the water they could from the concrete pad underneath. When we ate lunch they all looked at us longingly because they probably hadn't eaten anything all day. We all shared our lunches with them. It really pulls at your heart when you see things like that, and makes you wish there were more things you could do to help.

Ghana - Kakum National Forest

On our way to Tarkwa (about a 6 hours outside of Accra) we stopped at Kakum National Forest to do some sight seeing. It's a preserve for wild African jungle animals. I really wanted to see an elephant, but we didn't. However, after we left I made friends with an aligator when we stopped for lunch. Apparently they are very tame when they are full. But how do you know if they are full? That is the question...


The big attraction at Kakum is a canopy walk that they have through the huge trees. It consists of 7 ropes swings that are at least 100 ft above the ground that connect lookout platforms on the trees. It was really high, the pictures do not do it justice.

For those of you who don't know, I'm really scared of heights, but I did really well on the canopy walk! Except for the last platform. A bunch of us were on it and the weight was unbalanced so the platform tilted down about 6 inches on the side we were standing on. I just about freaked. Imagine, you are 100 ft up on a platform and it starts tilting down on one side... not the most confortable feeling. After that I practically ran over the last bridge to get back on solid ground. Here's a picture of our whole group (minus Wendy) on one the platforms. We were supposed to make scared faces. Some of us seem more scared than others.

Ghana - Solar Water Purifier

The project I've been working on with 5 other students was a solar water purifier. Clean water is a huge problem in Ghana. Many people get water out of rivers that are polluted really bad. Apparently the law in Ghana that regulates dumping waste into waterways states that as long as you dump a lower concentration of waste than what is already in the water that is ok. So as long as you dump less that the person above you or dilute the waste, you are fine. Not a very good strategy if you ask me.

After about 5 versions of our project over 8 months, we designed a solar collector that can purify a fixed volume of water. The idea behind this method of purification is that if water is heated to a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, the water will be sterilized and free of bacteria. On a sunny day our project can sterilize 0.5 liter of water in about 20 minutes.


Basically it is a fiberglass dish lined with mylar (a very reflective material) that focuses the suns rays to a single point, the focal point, much like a satellite dish. A bottle of water is them suspended by a stand at the focal point where it is heated by the focused suns rays. In the picture above I'm trying to locate the focal point by feeling where the air is the hottest (trust me, it gets VERY hot at the focal point) and adjusting the bottle to that point. Another more artistic picture of me doing tests on our project.

It was interesting, when we were making the dish at the shop, many of the guys that work there had never seen fiberglass before. They were fascinated by these 3 girls that were making a fiberglass dish. It was pretty fun to see.

Our project is going to be used in a town called Tarkwa. There is a big gold mine there that does a lot of civil service projects for the surrounding village. They built a very nice school for the children there and want to use our project to provide clean water for the children. Our project was very well received. We took 2 units that we made and they want to make about 20 more! The good thing about implementing the project there is that our project was given to an engineer who is in charge of the civil service projects. He understands how it works and has the skills and resources to maintain and reproduce our project which helps make it sustainable.

At the end of the year we were really close to getting a constant flow purification system working. This would actually be a better system because no one has to change the water every 30 minutes, it would be able run on it's own all day. There's going to be another BYU group continuing our project next year, so hopefully they'll be able to get that up and running! Here's a picture of the portion of our team that went to Ghana: Jennifer, Wendy and I.

Ghana!

I've finally gotten around to blogging about my trip to Ghana now that I'm back from Washington and have all our pictures! I went to Ghana after graduation with an Engineers Without Borders group from BYU. I've been in a class for EWB where we've worked on humanitarian engineering projects for people in Ghana and Peru. The projects we took to Ghana were a windmill, a solar water purification unit (my project), and a biofilter toilet a group has been working on with an engineer there. I have a lot of cool pictures and stories from the trip, so to eliminate a really long post I'm going to put individual posts about different things over the next few days. I hope you all enjoy it!