Monday 2nd December 2007
Tulear – Chez Lala
16:57 (UK) / 19:57 (Madagascar)
You are probably now thinking I have no one else to speak to. You’d be right. My French is getting rapidly better – but my conversational level has only yet found a ‘Can I please possibly have another roll of toilet paper?’ high, so having an interesting thought provoking conversation is difficult. I did however have a very good meeting – in a mixture of French and English with the people at ADES.
ADES are BVCO’s project partners in the stove programme, and they have so far been responsible for constructing the stoves that we have created the demand for in Andavadoaka. A lot of interesting discussion indeed! Thanks to the support of the Adventure Company we will be able to start a new programme in Morondava working heavily with ADES to distribute approximately 250 solar box ovens,100 parabolic solar stoves, a number of yoyo stoves and mitigate approximately 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the first 3 years. We also discussed the establishment of an ADES-BVCO workshop around the Andavadoaka region to reduce issues of transportation from Tulear and open up the possibility of future projects in further away areas. Monitoring will be high on the agenda for BVCO during this phase of project development and whilst ADES provides the technical knowledge of stove construction, BVCO will be providing the monitoring protocols and verifying the emission claims. A new protocol developed by BVCO and Eco ltd (www.ecoharmony.com) will be trialled during this time. All exciting stuff really.
The walk back from ADES left me very burnt. It has been 40 degrees at midday and only cooling by about ten degrees it feels.
I had my exercise fix this morning – and went for a run to Tulear port and along the ‘beach’ (more a polluted mud flat) – surprisingly the jeering was about as bad as walking, but at least they passed quicker. It was short but gave me an appetite today. I have eaten my body weight in lychees- perhaps not the most balanced of diets and I really hope I don’t turn into one – a pink dimply crusty fruit.
Right, off I must go to deal with this monitoring data!
Offset now with bvco – www.bvco.org.uk
