Week 2
Day 1 / May 21st, 2012
The boss of the WindAid, Michael VerKamp, asked me and my friend if we want to join him on a road-trip as soon as we get off the plane in Trujillo, as "something came up". I decided to go so we were picked up as soon as we get off the airport for a 6 hour drive. The airline, TACA, had great service as they provided food for even one-hour hop flights, however they never know which terminal the plane will come in at so kept changing the terminal. On the flight over the Andes we could clearly see mountains and how the color and coverage of vegetation varied from one valley to the next. Clouds filled some valleys but not others demonstrated the partitioning effect of mountains.
We arrived at the airport in Trujillo after transferring in Lima. The airport is so small it has only one terminal. The car that Michael drove to pick us up is similar to a Nissan Pathfinder. It used to belong to the security of the French Embassy and has a siren. Michael is funny and has tons of stories to tell. He also seems to run on cigarettes and Inca Kola [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Kola]. We crammed into the truck with fellow volunteers Paul and Nick.
It's a 6-hour drive from Trujillo to Sechura along the Panamericana Norte highway. The drive through the desert was an experience, just how endless the dunes and sand stretch out on either side. It's so peaceful that it would be a perfect place for meditation. No wonder sometimes in imagery the desert and sand is associated with time and eternity. Of course appearances are deceiving, when we're driving at [broken speedometer] speeds, the landscape do change rather quickly. The desert are also dotted with dried-up living trees. These short trees are supposedly able to survive in a dormant state without water for many months, and revive to grow spread seed given the occasional rain. Their barbs also has a chance to penetrate a car's tire, or soles of heavy-duty work boots.
I must also mention the traffic, during the drive we constantly dodged between our lane and the incoming traffic to pass slow-moving vehicles. Of course sometimes the other side tries to do the same and we'd have to dodge onto the curb. The traffic rules in Peru is quite simple, the biggest vehicle makes the rules. (Similar to Golden Rule:"One with the gold makes the rules.")
The side of the road are dotted with occasional settlements. Sometimes a town and on many occasion chicken farms, since chicken is a staple food in Peru. The road ran parallel with power transmission lines, and cellphone towers rose on the top of hills. However the people living along the road do not get any of the power since there are no transforming stations or local distribution. However they try to use poles to steal the power. (I don't actually know how this works.) While others either run their own generators or tried building wooden windmills to generate power. Michael hope to sell a new, smaller wind turbine under development to these people which can increase his publicity as so many drive along the highway, so that he may get more funding from the government.
At night we stopped at a roadstop for you guessed it, cigarettes and Inca Kola, and appreciate the starlight. The scene was also unreal, it was like a scene from Twilight Zone: dark for miles around, with the only light coming from headlights of our car and windows of the grocery store.
We bribed the highway police to get through a roadblock. It's blocking a stretch of the highway "under repairs" due to heavy rains brought by El Nino and climate change: there's a lake in middle of the desert and some of the road is washed out. Michael used to get stopped by the police about every hour on these trips, until he put green reflective tape on the bumpers like the police do. Usually the 10 or 20 soles would be good to make the police let you go. Michael once argued with the police for not having done anything wrong, and after showing all the right paper work the police said, "Hey, you didn't have your safety triangle. That's not safe and against the regulations." And he was fined over 100 soles. Anyhow, it would've been a 4-hour detour if we didn't bribe the police to go through the roadblock, so there's no choice in the matter. Of course, the police were very nice, just very underpaid.
When we got to Sechura, the local drivers paraded us around the town after we asked them for directions. (We drove behind them and they drove in circles.)
We stayed in a shady hotel in Sechura, where there isn't any hot water, and bathroom was quite dirty. At night the volunteers had beer out in front of the hotel and we gave one to the hotel owner. Later we found out we gave beer to a man carrying a gun who hasn't slept in 3 days. Of course, Sechura is a very safe and relatively crime-free town, in stark contrast to Bayovar which I will talk about later.
This morning we woke quite late due to all the traveling, and rode a mototaxi (a sawn-in half motorcycle with a passenger cage attached to the back) to center of town for brunch. While there's only seat for 2 me and Nick stood on the back of the cab and waved at everyone as if we're riding a Roman chariot.
Later we went to SeaCorp's barracks to show Michael's prospective clients the wind turbine installed there. SeaCorp is a scallop farming business run by Michael's friend, Ian. Scallop farming was the main local economy. There was actually a black tide in February that killed all the scallops in the bay, and some scallop farm business owners killed themselves because of the disaster. SeaCorp is the biggest of these businesses and they are trying to restart with bringing in more technology to add redundancy.
[Previous operators of this car at the French Embassy were trained in gun'in and run'in]
After SeaCorp we went for a business meeting in another town. I never got the name of this town but it was mainly concerned with shipbuilding. The ships were built out of wood, about 10m long with a cabin on top, mainly used for fishing and operation of sea farms. There were hundreds and hundreds of ships lined in various stages of construction. The people there looked to be impoverished and there were camps under the shade of some of the ships. We were supposed to meet some people at a hotel but everyone we asked seemed incredulous at the idea that there could be a hotel in their town. Finally we found the hotel in a neighborhood that seemed to have been under construction for a long time, and retrieved electronics for one of the wind turbines from a trailer. While there we saw someone biking around selling melted ice cream in an ice box, and a brick house half-built around a very nice door they might have found somewhere.
Finally, at night we went to drink and tell stories at a convenience store. This night we moved to a nicer (2-star) hotel that had hot water and was clean.
Day3 / May 23rd, 2012
In the morning we retrieved a wind turbine. This one was sold to an oil and gas exploration site, and after not finding anything and leaving the area, they decided to donate the turbine to a nearby community. (Actually the original owner unfortunately passed away due to an accident.) We went there to move the turbine, and the meeting yesterday was to retrieve the electronics for the turbine.
The turbine sits on a mast 9m high, using 8 guide wires to hold it in place vertically, 2 in each orthogonal direction. There are 3 blades 6 ft long, and produces 2kW of power.
Five concrete foundations about 1x1x1m reinforced with rebar hold the guide wire anchors and the base of the mast. Cable, a short pole, and the car is used to lower and raise the mast.
The electronics consist of car batteries (easily replaceable), rectifier, inverter, breaker, and dissipator for when too much heat is generated.
The turbine has no gear box and the hub/rotor assembly IS the generator. The blades are selected to work at extremely high speeds. At optimal wind conditions, the turbine turns at a ferocious rate. The rotor-blade assembly must be finely balanced to minimize vibrations. At SeaCorp, where a contractor installed the foundations improperly, cracks can be seen inside the concrete.
We disassembled the turbine to take it to the seaside community, Playa Blanca. It's a 15km drive and we had to ride on the outside of the car because the back was stuffed with turbine parts. Of course we drove very slowly and it was safe, but we also got splashed by spray coming out of the back of a fish refrigeration truck.
The community was very nice, the turbine is put up outside of the school so kids crowded around to play with the volunteers. The foundations were pre-installed so we only have to reassemble the pieces.
[Playa Blanca is a community of less than 200 people]
Back at Playa Blanca, we finished assembling the turbine and electronics. It turns out that one of the LED lights have a short which burnt out the inverter. Unfortunately we did not have a good replacement but a small inverter kept the few LEDs on. The turbine is meant to provide light for the school and eventually the town (rather than running any appliances). In the near future, as the turbine provide savings for lighting compared to candles and kerosene lamps, the community can buy more cable to hook up lights to the turbine.
Day4 / May 24th, 2012
On this day we drive back to the city of Trujillo. But first we visited SeaCorp's new facilities. There's a walled and fenced off area filled with giant modern-looking plastic containers, building material, and a shiny new generator. Ian, the owner, told us his plans and stories.
If building all that in the middle of nowhere, Peru, far from technological industry, sounds hard, they must contend with unique local problems as well. The generator was delivered with exhaust facing the wall and no one bothered to turn it around for quite a while. The men putting up the roof did not start assembling for 3 days from not being able to find a tool (to their credit, they finished it in a day after finding it). Excuses for coming late to work include not having had breakfast, lunch, or not being able to catch a ride.
Other stories from Ian involve him hiring shady people. Once his truck was stopped by robbers, and in response he asked which of them want a fixed salary. One man who was nicknamed "The Bear" climbed on top the the truck and lifted with his bare hands the high voltage wire that was blocking the truck. After working for a year or so The Bear was taken away by the police for murders committed before all this. There were also stories of desperate people coming to work as divers, as divers are paid alot and no police would go looking for them on the bottom of the sea. Most of the divers could not swim and simply use lead weights to walk along the bottom. A compressor and plastic tubing pump air down to the divers, and the divers communicate with their support by pulling so many times on a line. Of course some of the support staff can't count so sometimes the signal gets mixed.
We visited the community of Playa Blanca after that and the volunteers played on the beach, along with the kids. I sat in the shade and sketched a bit, also chatting with Michael about his past. Finally we left after Nick was stung after stepping on what we believe to be a stingray. The main work people at Playa Blanca do seem to be the maintenance of scallop farms. Concrete foundations are cast on the beach to be towed out to sea as anchor for nets.
On the way back to Trujillo we stopped at an upscale restaurant so Nick can have his revenge in the form of stingray pancake. The night driving was harrowing as there are no street lights and the edge and center of the road are barely visible. Most of the incoming traffic drives on high beam making it even harder to see. We narrowly missed some motorcycles driving with broken lights.
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