Day 13: Finishing Touches & Secondary Projects
Hola everyone!!
For everyone following us on our journey - we have now officially finished both of our solar dryers!! After a breakfast of fried eggs and cantaloupe, we headed to the worksite and finished all of the final touches on our ovens (adding a flap to close off the bottom of the collector on oven #2, sealing both ovens with silicone, etc.). After we were officially done with the ovens, the community members (and the PUC team) couldn’t wait to start putting mesquite pods into the ovens to start testing them and drying some pods!
The community members took two bags of mesquite pods that they’d been storing up to the roof to show us how they wash the pods before they begin the drying process. They washed all of the pods on the roof, shook them to get most of the water out, and then laid them out on wire mesh trays in the sun to let them dry out a little more before we put them in our ovens. We put the pods in both ovens right before lunch time! There was a lot more cloud cover today, but they seem to be drying really well - oven one got up to 170 degrees Fahrenheit with the vents closed!
Since we are done with our ovens, we now focused our attention (and what little time left we have in the community) on some secondary projects that we and the community members identified as improvements that we can make to ensure that their process runs more efficiently. I was on the Ramp and Chute team - adding a ramp and chute that will make it much easier to transfer the pods from the roof to the milling room below. We cut pieces of plywood and varnished them, and hopefully we’ll finish assembling this design (made by David in CAD) tomorrow!
The other two teams that worked today were the Oven Cover team (or sewing team, as we referred to them last night during our daily meeting) and the Experimentation team. The oven cover team was designing a way to cover the ovens, which will have many benefits - help provide a quick way to protect them from rain, ensure that they are safe and no one tries to steal any of the materials from our ovens, and make it quicker to cover them rather than try and deal with a huge tarp that isn’t the correct dimensions for the ovens. Minerva even took on her own personal project - making covers for the glass portions of our ovens! The community members mentioned that it often hails during the rainy season here, something we didn’t think of before implementation, so Minerva suggested creating covers for the glass portions so they don’t break when it hails. The final team was working on an experimentation plan. Since these ovens are prototypes that we want the community members to continue using, and since we don’t have much more time here to experiment, we’re leaving behind a lot of ideas on different ways they can test the ovens, tips and suggestions on maintenance and improvement on the ovens, and a operations manual.
We left the worksite around 5 (a full work day, even on a Saturday!) and came back to the hotel to find that we were eating dinner outside on the pavilion! The sun was going down, it was cooling off, and it made for the perfect atmosphere for our tlayuda dinner, cooked right next to us on the grill.
After dinner, most of us stayed on the pavilion for hours, talking and laughing and having a great time. The owner of the hotel, Alejandro, kept coming by our table, offering us traditional Oaxacan food such as a delicious leafy herb called chepiche. He has made us feel very welcome in his hotel and in Oaxaca! While we were talking, David also shared some wonderful pearls of wisdom about finding a career path that you’re passionate about, but not getting so stuck on how you think your life should turn out; he talked about always aiming for happiness and how some of the best things that happen to you are things you never planned for. As someone going into my 4th year who doesn’t really know what I want to do with the rest of my life, it was a really uplifting and positive talk!
Tomorrow we plan on having an optional work day, to give some of the teams more time to work on their respective secondary projects. We’ll also be getting a homemade mole lunch at Lydia’s house, one of the community members. I can’t wait!
Adios, mi amigos!
