Hilti is an international world leading company that provides power tool and fixtures equipment to the civil engineering industry. Last year e.quinox members got in touch with contacts at Hilti to help with the provision of specialist tools necessary to build our Rugaragara kiosk. Hilti kindly donated to e.quinox two specialist kits of drilling equipment which allowed for the successful implementation of the kiosk. This year Hilti has generously donated thousands of pounds of cordless tools including drilling and cutting tools that will allow us to carry out further civils work to improve the kiosk.

“Hilti donated some tools to e.quinox for the construction of the hydro kiosk last year and we were very impressed with the results. When e.quinox got back in touch this year, we only thought how we can help them further. It was a no brainer and therefore this year we not only provide our products, we will also provide services for the equipment. These people are changing lives, and this is the least that we can do” said Pavlos Gklavinas from Hilti at the lunch-time handover event.

e.quinox would like to extend a massive thank you to Hilti and we look forward to nurturing a strong and close working relationship over the coming years as we also work closely with their engineers to improve our technical engineering solutions.

I’m quite glad that even long-winded discussions can result in simple statements like this one. On the other hand, what is at stake is not the stomach’s happiness after a meal of either bruschettes or Pizza, but rather the fate of an entire village.

Cooperating with the UN-habitat to bring electricity to a Tanzanian refugee village this year has been probably one of the most challenging, but also rewarding experiences. When you enter the village just about an hour’s drive from Rwanda’s capital Kigali, you realise that this should not actually be called one. Merely a collection of 50 houses organised in three straight lines of 19, 19 again and then 12 houses, but without bar, kiosk or anything remotely business-like, the villagers still seem to be in the process of finding out what their actual role in the village is. When we arrived, a simple two water tanks, a shack with a door but without window and the well-planned similarity of every single house were the only unifying elements here.

However, now the shack has been turned into a hopefully vibrant Energy Kiosk, along with a rather sublime Social Engineering project/experiment (Who says we’re only electrically minded anyway?). “Empowering people” would probably be the catch line if we tried to sell this idea on. What we envision is to give the village’s five leaders, typically farmers who have to depend on a good day’s weather to earn their money, full responsibility of the kiosk’s operations and accounts. Why so? Well, the village leaders are usually the most wise/old people in Rwandan villages and have been chosen by the rest of the community to be responsible for their own welfare. The real reason though lies in the fact that we hope it will unite the village once and for all. Each village leader being responsible for one “umudugudu” in the village, that is a cluster of about ten houses, the entire village’s population will feel directly involved with our project.

Thinking about it now, involving locals more in our projects has actually been one of the key points of our trip this year. Not only have we again met up with loads of students from KIST (Kigali’s Imperial) to help with the implementation of our kiosks, no, we have also successfully managed to hand over the entire operation of one of our other kiosks (Kamonyi) to a local cooperative. But more about this in another post.

Now back to Kavure, the UN-habitat village, and a few other (slightly weird) notes on things that happened there:

1. Having a random villager approach you and ask for your sister’s hand, which is not even present, feels slightly uncomfortable.
2. Having the same villager calling you the next day to offer you fish which he caught single-handedly is kind of cute.
3. Not being able to go to Burundi (4km from this village) because the visa would cost $90 is such a waste of unused passport space
4. Sitting down inside a car expecting to drive for about half an hour to get bruschettes and then being dropped off about 57 seconds later on the other side of the 19 houses feels a bit Mzungu-like
5. Then being offered fresh goat meat out of a tiny shack with flies all round it  feels too local though

And finally

Being followed all around the village by kids just to capture them about 754,643 times on camera is kinda tiring.

But definitely worth it.

Sawa, sawa, sawa, yeah.

After a 4 and half hour, bumpy and cramped bus ride from Kigali, we’re finally there…. Banda!

The site where our colleagues from DHE implemented two pico-hydro sites.Population: 7000 – local partners: KAGENO – zero grid implementation plans till 2050.

We get off the bus, all excited to see a new typical Rwandan village… But wait… WHERE ARE ALL THE HOUSES?? We’re in the middle of a jungle! Exotic trees, huge worms, insane amounts of insects, weird bird noises all over, a bunch of monkeys crossing the road. We’re actually very close to the Nyungwe national reserve. But no sign of any human being…

To my surprise, they tell us the village is actually around one hour and 45min from the road! There’s no ‘road’ per say, just a laid out curvy (and very rocky) downwards path, which they tell me is 11km! But thankfully, there are shortcuts apparently…

Did I say shortcuts? I meant extremely steep passageways through the forest… but hey, at least there’s monkeys right?

After the third ‘shortcut’ I start regretting all those times I bailed out on hiking back home… It was such a pain! Dodging tree roots, tripping over rocks… I’m already dreading the way back up!

But after an hour and 15 min, NOW I can say it: Banda!

We can finally see it, and boy what a view! All the way down in a valley, surrounded by hundreds of hills, is a small t-shaped arrangement of houses – that’s apparently the town centre – with a handful of houses spread out along the valley… Talk about isolated! It’s incredible how anyone can even find such a place! We wasted a couple of minutes debating how the 1^st settler got here… Ted from DHE thinks he was drunk on banana beer (a local speciality) and got lost in the woods, to then give up and decide to just settle here.

But jokes aside, the view is actually breathtaking! The top of surrounding hills touch on the clouds, clear blue mountains further away, birds flying over our heads, green fields as far as the eye can see, and a bunch of banana trees popping out here and there.

We make our way down only to be greeted by kids calling us ‘muzugus’ (white people), following us everywhere and saying ‘good morning teacher’ (seemingly  the only English sentence they learned at school)… An adorable little girl just stood there at one point with her arms wide open, and went towards us to hug us! While other kids just wanted to hold our hands for some reason… Apparently we’re the most exciting thing that happened in the area for quite some time.

We make our way towards the place where we were staying, still followed by kids, and greeted ‘mwiriwe’ by the friendly local village people. In the house we find Jeremiah, a 28-year old public health student that works with Kageno, very nice guy, friendly, and gets excited over anything! We then sample some bananas, which we all agree are the best we ever had – by far.

Afterwards, we make our way to the 1^st site,which had broken down and was being repaired. The 1^st person I see there, is a member of DHE with a massive beard ‘à la Robinson Crusoé’ and hair bands on his heads that made it seem like he had palm trees growing on his head! At first I thought solitude drove the guys here crazy! Nice 1^st impression! Lol

We spent the biggest part of the day doing technical stuff (fixing the intake filter, arranging the turbine misalignment etc.), which I won’t bore you with. We then had some talks with local people about what future prospects could be, and about bringing up some second-hand battery boxes to the area.

Unfortunately, our time was up! I would have loved to stay longer in the place, it was genuinely a great experience… But a potential site for next year was calling… Hopefully I’ll be in the team that comes back to Banda in the following weeks.

Then came the walk up… What a hike! And of course, it HAD to rain… perfect! I quickly realised my boots didn’t deserve that title; I was slipping every two steps I made, and struggled to keep balance even while standing still! My teammates who were doing better than me, rather that helping me out, decided it would me more useful  to film me slipping and getting all covered in mud… Eh Lukas? But I can’t complain – at least we got great footage for the fresher’s video! Lol

If the walk down was a pain, the walk back up was torture! The path was so steep!! Around 30deg. easily (but I still believe it’s at least 45deg. Mikolaj ). One of the most tiring experiences of my life…. Best part was seeing kids barefoot carrying a huge basket on their heads overtaking us! Pretty embarrassing…

An hour… two hours… we still can’t see the top of the hill (more like a mountain if you ask me)… It’s a miracle how Bandan’s can make this hike more than once a week! The only other option is a 3000RWF ($5) moto-taxi ride, a sum that’s a worth a whole two weeks’ income for some farmers here!

Two and half hours, and we’re finally back on the road, back to ‘regular’ civilisation, so to speak… Only to be greeted this time by the badly-cramped out-lengthy-bus-ride back.

Regardless of the all the trouble hiking, Banda was way worth all the effort! I really hope I’ll get to go one more time before I come back to London!

Abdalla Abou Jaoude

No we are not talking about the browsing experience developed by a certain US company that can be dreadfully slow in Rwanda. Last weekend we experienced the ancient meaning behind safari. The word itself comes from the East African language Swahili and means, “to travel”. During the period of colonialism the word was adopted by Europeans to describe the act of travelling to watch wild animals. Rwanda is the perfect spot to do so with three national parks offering a wide variety of species in different climatic regions. The Volcano National Park in the North, known for its Gorillas, the jungle-like Nyungwe National Park in the South West, which neighbours Congo and Burundi, and the Akagera National Park savannah bordering Tanzania.

Although we are Imperial College students and thus drilled to work hard on our electrification project {;P} we also deserve some sweet relaxation time refuelling our souls with sunlight and procrastination. Due to the high price of the Volcano Park we decided to drive out to the cheaper Akagera Park on a sunny Saturday. We started our journey at 4am half asleep with a fearless driver, who seemed to accelerate in sharp, obscured turns and when pedestrians stood on the street. After two hours of fear and bumpy roads we arrived at the southern tip of the 70km long park. With six hours of muddy road ahead of us we let onboard our guide leaving us seven students squeezed in the jeep back designed for 5. The park ranger, by us deemed to be a wildlife expert due to his camouflage outfit and big binoculars hanging around his neck, introduced himself as a bird expert. With all respect, we were not here to spot tiny birds and learn the differences in their mating songs, but rather see the famous big five as the park ranger could suspect from the standard ignorant non-African visitor.

5 minutes in the park the driver suddenly stopped. A family of baboon monkeys blocked the street. Staring back at us they did not seem to fear the car and took their time to clear the road. Even to the extend that the alpha male had time to mate a couple of his female family members before departing into the steppe land with victorious posture. We continued our journey up north along the Akagera river and lakes. Our ranger pointed out that due to the dry weather conditions during the last days most of the animal herds moved to the north of the park. The early morning sun slowly disappeared behind light rain clouds that unfortunately brought us a quick shower just as we got our of the jeep next to a river bed. We were just able to see the last hippopotamus and their kids walk into the water. Although our guide told us that those massive creatures attacked people he reassured us that there was no danger getting closer to the river. While watching the hippos disappear below the water surface and materialize again with an air, water fountain of exhalation we discovered another specie just two meters away in the water from where we stood. Crocodiles were swimming across the water.

Sitting in the car again, we scared smaller herds of antelopes. Our guide explained to us the differences between impalas, bushbucks, waterbucks, and zebus. We also lived through a moment of Disney childhood nostalgia when we saw a “pumba” eating its way though the park. During the long ride we experienced periods of collective tiredness and mass paranoia. The paranoia was triggered by small flies with the ability to sting. At some point about five of those creatures kept us busy hitting wildly across the jeep and made us following our basic instincts when we felt a tickling sensation on our skin. The guys in the back used this as an opportunity for much hilarity by causing those in the middle row to jump from the simple action of a poke. From this moment on the driver and guide possibly categorized us as mad.

Arriving in the north of the park all cameras and smartphones were loaded, pointing in all possible directions to shoot whatever ran across our way. And like a paparazzi we experienced one hour non stop action: monkeys, warthogs, antelopes, zebras, hippos, giraffes, elephant faeces, buffalos, ‘muzungus’ (white people) sitting in other jeeps and a variety birds. One could have the impression that we were so busy catching every animal on digital memory that we forgot about recording our own ‘analogue’ image and emotion. … First world problems as we call them. As the park ranger has put it at the very beginning when we were eating cookies: “you are not here to feed your stomachs but your eyes with the sight of the animals”.

What an impressive experience for all us. Reminding us how important biodiversity is and environmental awareness. As a farewell present the birds above the park exit presented us with a rain fusillade of crap as we walked underneath. The secret revenge of the bird expert to withhold the knowledge of this common attack, as the white spotted ground showed. {J}.

Lukas Lukoscheck

Amakuro, greetings from the land of a thousand hills! Our expedition team is enjoying the first week in Rwanda, and I have plenty of exciting news to keep you guys updated. The adventure began even before we arrived in Rwanda, with one team member forgetting to check that his passport was actually already expired (blame the Europeans for not requiring a passport when traveling within Europe, haha). When we landed at Addis Ababa for transit, the oxygen mask compartment a few rows ahead of us decided to fall from the plane ceiling, which made me all the more appreciative of physically getting to Rwanda in one piece. Nah, I’m probably over-dramatizing this ‘ordeal’. At least Ethiopian Airlines provided some in-flight comfort – beer.

I was really excited about meeting the DHE team (Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering) for the first time in Kigali. We have had numerous Skype meetings, but meeting face-to-face and living under one roof in Kigali will be a different experience altogether (I was quite sure they had queer habits! lol). What really surprised me was how we sat around one night playing geeky card games and solving riddles. By then I was convinced that geekiness transcends geographical boundaries.

On a more serious note, we went on a mandatory visit to all our 3 Energy Kiosk sites. As usual, the first-timers were very excited and started snapping photos every 30 seconds. It was great to see their first reaction to the kiosks – It must have been really cool to physically see the kiosks that everyone has been working on and talking about for the entire year.

Besides visiting the kiosks, we were busy sorting out administrative stuff, such as haggling for electrical/mechanical components from the metal market, calling 10,000 people (TIA!) to get our shipment in Rwanda and Tanzania sorted, and taking turns to shower with limited water supply.

So there you have it! I should probably make myself more useful with the data logger experiment (Var is also nagging me to stop now). Till the next time!

Some people may ask why we should bring electricity to isolated villages. How will they use it? Do they even have electrical appliances? Well, we went to see how electricity has impacted the lives of the villagers in of Nyamyunba, close to Gisenyi in northern Rwanda and we found some unexpected results.

Electricity was used in most places we thought about. It greatly helped the local administration which now uses computers and internet saving hours of write machine and days of posted mails. It is also used at the local school allowing night classes as well as in the nearby health centre. Finally, it made life easier and cheaper for the householders. The cost of lighting (they used candles before then) and charging batteries has significantly decreased.

What we did not foresee is the business opportunities and the social impact electricity has brought. Even if they have limited resources, the entrepreneurs of Nyamyunba exploit at best what they have. We met with Fabrice, 22 years old, who owns a small cinema. He invested in a TV and DVD player and screens action movies twice a day.  He already has recovered his investment and now enjoys the profit of his successful cinema.

Fabrice's cinema

Like Fabrice, other young men of the village have opened a computer centre, haircut salons, grinding machine shop…. The best part was yet to come! When we got back to the village at night, we discovered it had become ‘the place 2B’ for all the surrounding villages. You could hear the radio for a mile around, shops were opened, and people got together. With three amazungus (white people) walking around, children started dancing to the music and parents laughing at them. Electricity made the night an entertainment time!

Light brings people together

As we drove back home, we crossed some villages who had no access to electricity. It was dark and dead calm. The contrast with Nyamyunba was shocking and inspiring; there is still some more work to do in electrifying rural Rwanda…

I decided to describe our site assessments in the next couple of posts as we’ve done some already and we’re going to do a couple in the next days. I’m really excited about them as we get to see rural Rwanda in different parts of the country. They are very interesting especially as some of the places are high in the mountains, on the fields or even in the jungle.

Waterfalls and the jungle – the purpose of our trip

Firstly we went to the Northern Province, knowing that in the district of Gakenke there is a hydro potential and some of our NGOs work there. It was also close to our energy kiosk in Minazi so we decided that’s it’s a great idea to go there as we can kill two birds with one stone.

Visiting Minazi was a great experience that gave us a lot of hope in our project and we were very happy about the outcome of this visit. On the way there, about 20min drive to the village we had to ask for the way. As it turned out the best way to do so was to show our logo and people suddenly could indicate the right road being happy that they could help. When we got there our kiosk was open and we could see happy customers coming to the kiosk to recharge their batteries. Our shopkeeper was really glad to see us and gave us really in-depth feedback about the scheme.  The local authorities said that they are very happy that our project was implemented there and they hope we can run it for the next couple of years, what is in line with our plans. On the way back to the main road in a different village we noticed a person with our battery box. That was definitely a highlight of this visit as we could see people using our battery boxes even in places relatively far from our kiosk.

Afterwards we went north to visit some potential hydro sites. We found out that we should ask local people for ‘Isuma‘ which means waterfall in Kinyarwanda. They were really helpful and we always had a couple of them to accompany us. After visiting a couple of sites we’ve were totally soaked and the tropical rain was just about to show us what it means to get wet. Nevertheless we decided to go to Ruhengeri for lunch and then visit a few more waterfalls.

On the way to Ruhengeri our driver told us that there is a well-known waterfall that used to be exploited 50 years ago but is no longer functional. We decided to stop there and see it. It was a great desicion as the civil works and the mechanical parts were still in place and except for the rust everything was in a really good condition. I wish we had had a screwdriver or a hammer to see the turbine inside the housing.

Afterwards we went to Ruhengeri, which is a relatively big city in the north of Rwanda and it’s really close to the volcano national park. Hence, we’ve seen some of the volcanoes.

VOLCANO!!!!

Leaving Ruhengeri we went to rural parts of Gakenke district. Although the road was marked as a good quality one, we were not allowed to forget about the place we were in as it was made out of the volcano stones which were really rough and uneven, forcing us to travel at maximum speed of 10 kph. Anyways, we knew that it’s a good spot for some further surveys as it was fairly remote, but still accessible. The last waterfall that we were to see was on the other side of the river and high up the hill. Looking for adventure we decided to follow a bunch of kids to the waterfall. Firstly we had to cross the river using a very unstable bridge bringing up memories of the film about the adventures of Indiana Jones. As soon as we crossed it we arrived in the local market with numerous people asking us to join them for a corn and locally made banana based drink. However, as we were running out of time we had to thank them for the invitation and move on with our hike. Going up the hill we were given an opportunity to practice greetings in Kinyarwanda a lot. Unfortunately as it was getting dark we had to turn back and get to the car hoping to come back there soon. At some point the kids started running away from us as so we started running after them down the hill and the game of tag started. Unfortunately we couldn’t continue the game for long as the sun already set and we had a long way back home, so we left Shyira and went back home. Although we expected it to be a short trip, as it turned out the rain made the river to flood the shortcut that we wanted to use, therefore, it took us about 4 hours to get back home.

The best bridge ever...

‘Site assessment no.2′ coming soon…

Hi everyone!

Richard and I arrived in Rwanda 3 weeks ago and now as we’ve got access to the blog we’re intending to blog about our experiences here. Hopefully, you’ll find our posts interesting and we’ll be able to familiarize you with East Africa at least a bit.

Although the trip was long, our excitement about the trip overcame the tiredness so we were ready to walk around Kigali and sort out the most important issues. We met some of DHE members in the Discover Rwanda Youth Hostel and while waiting for the rest of their team to arrive we’d started our search for a house. Over the next couple of days we’ve found 3 potential places. After a number of very interesting meetings with estate agents and landlords we decided to rent a house in a neighbourhood called Kacyiru. It’s a nice house with a garden and a beautiful view of the city.

View from our garden

When DHE team was moving in, Richard and I decided to visit one of our kiosks in the district of Bugasera. We took a small old bus and enjoying public transportation in Rwanda we went to Rweru – the sector where our kiosk is. On the way there I was given lessons of Kinyarwanda pronunciation. It was a market day and as Batima is very close to the border there were a lot of people from both Rwanda and Burundi. It was very interesting to see all of them and all of the things that they were selling including sandals cut out of old tyres or radios being just the circuit boards with speakers attached. At first we went to the kiosk to check up on it and then we met the leader of Rweru sector. He mentioned that our project is really important for the community and people are willing to use it.

Bugasera kiosk and our shopkeeper - Eric

Later as we had to wait for our bus back home we decided to go to a local bar and grab a traditional goat brochette and spicy grilled bananas. Afterwards we went for a short walk around the village. Suddenly we were surrounded by many kids as ‘Abazungu’ (word in Kinyarwanda meaning a foreigner, a traveller) is not a very common thing to see.

Richard surrounded by kids

Our biggest mistake was to take a shortcut through primary school. All the kids had stopped their activities and just ran after us to greet us or talk to us. Unfortunately our Kinyarwanda abilities were not sufficient to involve in a long conversation but those few phrases were enough to surprise them. Soon after we left Batima and went back to Kigali to our new home.

These were our first 5 days in Rwanda in which we managed not only to visit a part of this beautiful country of ‘a thousand hills’ but also to attend a couple of meetings with NGOs, Kigali Institute of Science and Technology representatives and Ministry of Infrastructure officials.

Please follow us. We’ll post again soon describing our adventures.

This year we’ve decided to start blogging about e.quinox trips. As we’ve just been granted an access to the blog, we want to update you on all things that happened so far and then we’ll keep you up to date. As you may know already from our about page we’re dealing with rural electrification in Rwanda.

Having 3 energy kiosks in Rwanda already, our plans for this summer include implementing 2 new kiosk – one in UN Habitat refugee camp in Rwanda and one by the school in a Tanzanian village. We’ve also started collaboration with Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering from Dartmouth College (US) on hydro energy kiosks. This summer we’re going to introduce our business model to their existing site and look for a perfect hydro site in Rwanda to implement an energy kiosk powered by micro-hydro next year. Because of the amount of work that we have to do this year we’ve decided to send some of our team members mid-July to make sure that everything is ready for the new sites and to get permission from Rwandan government for implementing the hydro project.

We are very excited about the summer so please follow us to see what’s going on in Rwanda and Tanzania.

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