The Truth About Rango

We saw the movie Rango the other day.  It was pirated, but that’s all they sell in the shops in this country.  I hope that this blog may entice a couple of people to pay to see the movie and hence I will justify my pirated copy through free advertisement.  Anyway, although the thing is a little quirky, I found myself associating with the character – Rango.  I mean, I am just a little odd, I have walked into a world in which the “source of societal discontentment” is often water and then I pretend that I am the man who can save the day even though I have little idea of how to do it.  There is a sinister side to the water and ultimately there is evil lurking around the corner, controlling the water, oppressing the people and strangling their crops.  To save the day you have  to eyeball the evil and make your stand even though you know you are dealing with a very powerful figure.  I’m sure I will die one day, probably from infection.  Funny movie but very real.  Of course this all only makes sense with God in the background, weaving his magic, revealing his power.  
These are garden beds put in by the Nazarene church youth in an attempt to get some income.  These are full of dead vegies – hope that dried up when their bore failed.  Its now late into the dry season and their bore was not bashed down far enough.  I am trying to help them get the bore down further.  Just on the quiet, I’ve never done boring work before.  The farm I grew up on relied on a spring further up the hill and the water came down by gravity.  But now, in true naive style I have been dubbed the expert.  We employed a guy to do the work but the chain on the pulley he uses to pull up the bore pipe snapped and he has given up.  I bought a three tonne pulley (block and endless chain type) and with a bit of grunting in the bottom of the dry well with a Timorese and 200 mozzies we somehow managed to pull out the pipe. 
The simple way to make a bore in this country is to bash a 40mm diameter steel pipe into the ground as far as you can.  Then pull out the pipe however you can and clean out the dirt stuck inside.  Repeat this process until you hit water – preferably in a sandy layer.  Then pull out the pipe,  clean it one last time and bash the bottom end flat into a “spear” shape.  You cut some grooves just above the spear end to let water seep in and then bash the pipe into the ground to stay.  Because this bore pipe did not go far enough down we had to cut off the spear and bash it down and add another length to the pipe with a joiner.  This is where I made my fatal flaw.  I didn’t tighten the join up properly.  We bashed the join about 2.4m down into the ground and the join came apart.  Now our options are to bash a whole new pipe or, if brave and dumb enough, climb down the bottom of the well and try to dig down to the join put a chain on it and pull it out.  It is possible, so long as the whole thing doesn’t collapse.  Save on burial costs I suppose.  Perhaps some heroes are just idiots who happened to survive.

Build Your Own Solar Hot Water System

Last week, my job was to go to Baucau and provide solar power and solar hot water for a friend working in the Seeds of Life Program (agriculture). It was a great opportunity to put in a gravity fed solar hot water system which we are building here in East Timor from locally available materials. Just in case you wanted to build your own or were intrigued as to how I did it here’s my little explanation. Its a rip-snorter of a system really.
You’ll need a 44 gallon drum (204L general fuel drum), about 8 lengths of 1/2” plastic pipe, 4 lengths of 3/4” plastic pipe, a bunch of T-fittings and other plumbing bits, some 3”x2” timber, insulation, flat sheet metal, glue, screws and nails etc. Basically stuff we can buy here from the local hardware shop.

We made a rectangle frame of timber and nailed some flat tin on the bottom to keep the mice out – this holds the old drum.
To insulate the drum, we covered it with a mattress which the Timorese make out of kapok – its like cotton wool only from a tree. (In the old days they used to stuff life-jackets with it.) You could use old rags or an old foam mattress I suppose. The Timorese man I was working with was very confused about why I’d want to lay a perfectly good drum on its side, on the roof and cover it with a mattress!!! These white skin folk are truly crazy. By the end though, he was convinced that this was a new business opportunity for him as he could see that he could build solar hot water systems using things he could buy and skills he had. The only thing he lacked was the technical design which he learnt on this day.
This then gets covered over with a sheet of flat ‘tin’ (actually a sheet of zinculume roofing iron). You can see my metal working skills are at a rather fundamental level minus the ‘funda’.         
The fun bit is making the solar collector. We are in the tropics so we just scrapped the whole glass box thing. I really think its superfluous for anyone below the 30th degree of latitude. I just cut all these plastic pipes up at around 2m long and glue them together with T-pieces. Its so simple you should have thought of it yourself. (Note, for those who are actually going to try this, that the sequence in which you glue it together is a bit tricky, put some thought into it)
 
Plumbing it into the drum takes a bit of thought. Solar hot water works on the principal of thermosyphoning – hot stuff rises (like me really) and cold stuff sinks. So at the bottom of the drum a pipe comes out to go down to the bottom of all the vertical tubes. (Note that I screwed this straight into the small hole in the drum, its a 3/4” fitting). The sun heats up the water in the tubes, it rises up and finds its way back into the top of the drum. I made my own little hole for a 3/4” fitting by using a small drill bit and drilling little holes around in a circle. (For the techno buffs, the messy hole I create receives a 3/4” steel nipple fitting which sort of threads its own hole in and then I plug it up with silicon.) The big hole in the drum is left for inspection and also to allow air trapped above the hot water intake to escape.
The single most important thing to get right is to allow for the expansion and contraction of hot water. If you stuff this up the whole thing could blow up. I just put in a rising pipe which goes up higher than the water in the holding tank (the holding tank is on a small hill behind the house, water comes into the solar hot water system by gravity.
The second most important thing is to make sure that the hot water goes uphill all the way from the vertical pipes into the drum and the cold water in the drum goes downhill all the way to the bottom of the vertical pipes.
And hey presto! Hot water.
The whole thing cost us about $25 in bits. Takes a day or so to build and mount.
PS If you live in one of those rich, fancy countries stuffed with heaps of rules I suspect this would be somewhat on the illegal side, so just forget I ever told you.
PPS If you want to pull this off under a pressurised system (like a pump) there is a simple way. If you cant figure it out, ask your grandfather. If he cant figure it out, email me.

A bamboo fence

Since I am a bit of a hippy at heart, I am always trying to steer my construction toward environmentally sustainable practices.  Its not puritan by any means and you may one day even see me with a chainsaw in my hand.  In Los Palos, they have a pressing need for food.  Samuel and Uli, the Pastors of a youth church, take in as many people as they can feed which is not a lot on a meagre $70 per month allowance.  They have an excellent patch of land but if they try to grow vegies some hungry person or animal ends up eating it before they do.  This means the land lays fallow and unproductive.  The challenge was to build the cheapest and most achievable fence possible with what we had.  It also had to be strong enough and tall enough to keep out children and goats from the garden.  That way they could harvest their food and give it to those who really needed it.  So we … ok, I came up with a bamboo fence design – I’ll take the credit, that way if it doesn’t work, you know who to blame.
First we dug a trench down 20cm deep and 20cm wide.   





Then we fill it with cement and rock – ok the cement came from Indonesia but the limestone rock was onsite and the sand came from a local river.  Spot  the flying rock from Keith’s hand.

We shoved in some bamboo poles about 1.8m long into the trench about every 2m.  The Timorese know which poles are good for posts, in this case its ‘red bamboo’ (I know to the untrained eye they look green, you might have to use your imagination)  The bottles are an idea for protecting the top of the bamboo from filling with water. 


Then we split a different type of bamboo in half for the horizontal fence rails.  This is easier than you may think – if you have a good machete, and a good eye.  But once you’ve got the split going it tends to run along the grain and pop apart.
    
Then we cut more bamboo at 1.8m and split it up into strips about 4cm.  We nailed the pickets onto the rails with 5cm flat head nails and bent them over on the back.  Some pre-drilling goes down well. 
   
Then sections are carried to the poles to be screwed on with … wait for it … my little trade secret … roofing screws!  These screws bore their own hole into the bamboo without it splitting and hang on real tight – sensational!
Don’t tell anyone else about this.  I think bamboo is the next big thing that’s going to happen to Australia.  Just as soon as I finish mucking around in East Timor I’ll come and grow some bamboo in oz and make a mint off picket fences.
Ok, out of my instruction mode, we had a great time in Los Palos with the locals.  Uli and Cynthia had lots of long D&M’s and got to know each other real well.  It was a great soul time for them both (And I just thought they were sitting around not doing anything important?!)  We finally finished the last of the tiling a year after starting the building.  Credit must go to Sylvia for the long hours she put in grouting and cleaning.
 
We also finished building their shed walls, got the rafters and battens on the shed and provided funding for the iron which the Timorese will happily put on later. 
 
And all this in 3 days of action.  A big thanks to Alan Kent from Leongatha Salvation Army Corps and Sylvia, Keith and Lynise from Tweed Heads Salvation Army Corps who had the courage to come to East Timor and give of their time, talents and money to help make this a reality. 
It was a great time in Los Palos and a real boost to the youth – they’re finally seeing a bit of action.  This sort of work gives them hope and lifts their spirits.  They are the real heroes.
   
        They are the ones going around their community telling others about God and how great he is and what he has done for them.  There are many testimonies of how God how freed them from abuse, violence, disease and evil spirits.  There are many testimonies about how God meets their daily needs.  And I must testify too, to the way God has provided for us, watched over us and kept us safe.  I thank Him.