Ups and Downs and Solar Kebabs

It's been a week of  both sadness and happiness. We felt very far away grieving this week the sudden death of Karen in the UK, mum of Tawney and Heather who are friends of Amisadai and Louisa. And at the same time we celebrated with George and Rachel the birth of their first baby, also in the UK. And in the midst of our thoughts being in England, life goes on here. We had to say goodbye to Kate who has been working on her PhD here, living with Andy and Angela, and is now heading back to the UK. But on a happy note, we have enjoyed some useful science fun, a good time in Magozi and our first oranges (yum!).



The Cone Cookers with Bananas stuffed

with chocolate!



Cooking eggs

Our solar experimentation has been good fun. The girls have been learning about energy from the sun and we have been able to do some solar cone cooking eggs (first attempt failed as we didn't leave them long enough and they were a bit raw!) and chocolate bananas (delicious! But we left them too long and melted the cups!)



Oops! Melted cups



We tried fruity kebabs on parabola cookers and we are drying chilis and mangos in the awesome solar dryer Tim built. The solar dryer in particular is something we would like to work on as part of our stove project and encourage its use as a means of food preservation, supply of nutritious food and also possibly as a small local business idea. So it's been very useful science work!

Parabola Cooker Kebabs

Solar Dryer

Today we were in Magozi and had a good and encouraging time with the church there. It was very hot and dry there, and quite unbelievable how quickly the land has gone from lush green to dusty brown. Tim preached very well in Swahili with very impressive improvement to the last time he did this - always encouraging. We feel we are getting to know people and also realized a large number of people are wanting to join the group we will soon be starting to work on the stoves, so again, it is encouraging! This week, they will be digging the three large pits we will use to store and prepare the clay for the stoves.

Learning to weave in Magozi