On a related note, I just finished a mystery called "Finding Nouf" by Zoe Ferraris that put me in mind of the #1 Detective Agency books because it's a mystery set in a different culture, and you can learn a lot about the culture through the fictional protagonist. In this case, the mystery takes place in Saudi Arabia, and it was a very interesting behind-the-scenes look at Saudi culture.
Here's the BN link:
Absolutely. Having travelled on a car trip with 2SILs, 2BILs, and 4 kids, plus DH & I (2 cars) to a rather off the beaten track - we came back through a lot of mud hut villages. And would see the electrical power strung into a central place - which of course housed the area tv. On that memorable trip (and it was) the way back, due to car issues, we were going through villages so that one of the cars could keep getting water for the radiator. The elder sister (of my then DH) and her DH (the army colonel) decided I should ride in a car with the colonel (in civvies of course) and my DH - with the others squeezed in the 2nd car. Reason - 'cause my extremely fair complexion, eerily light eyes, well - they'd have issues if we looked like a mixed family - better the villagers thought I was a photo-journalist - so had all the cameras on the back seat with me!
Even in hutments (tenement type areas of little lean-tos, tin roofs or palm-roofs) you'll see something. When there is a construction area, often a lot of the laborers will have built a hutment area on the edge - labor is plentiful, so not everything is as mechanized as here.
Ellice
We are looking at many different types. The swimming pool would be a collector of heat which would then run into tubes which are embedded in the floors creating radiant heat. Our heating bills here are never usually over 40 dollars a month unless we heat the pool also...which we haven't in a few years.
There are so many workshops and learning annex type places here which address establishing an efficient solar system, using wind turbines as well. Of the three people I know who use solar and wind, none of them have utility bills and generally sell electricity back to the electric company. Wouldn't that be nice...
Yes, the panels heat the water and circulate it through the tubing in the floor. Right now the pool is like a bathtub. Very warm. I wish it would stay that way all year.
In a major dumpster dive last year, I recovered dozens of yards of extruded plastic heating blanket for the pool! I am going to buy a reel when they are cheapest and try it this year. I love to swim laps and I have a one lane lap pool. What I don't like, or my arthritis doesn't like is cold water!
They did that 40 years ago on Gilligan's Island!
The cover made a huge difference for us. But, with the pool being about 17' by 40', the reel was important.
I'm so hoping to get a real job soon, so that by next summer, after everything else we're clearing up we can get a small pool put in. The dog and I would be very happy.
ellice
What? The lap tops ?
No silly; Gilligan would ride the bike and the Professor got the radio to work, or one of the myriad things they somehow brought with them on the three hour cruise.
Here we had YEARS AGO [pre Cellulars] Solar Emergency phones along the Roads. Bus stations here have Solar roofs thus can be lit at night with Clean Energy. there are so many Solar inventions,,,,,, mirjam
Several members of my Family , told me that during WW2 they would lit their houses , by sitting on a [stationed] Bike and peddling . also kept their feet active . Now i have a pocket light that i can `squeeze and have light .
Years ago we had Fuel shortage and we were taught to `build` a wooden well closed box , in it we had some [dry] straw , we would maked a dish , cover it will , wrap in a towel , than put the box in the FULL sun ,,,,it Slow cooked the food in the box , sorry, It was years ago so i don`t remember all the parts !!! But i remember the WONDERMENT of it cooking itself like this.
mirjam
In the 1950s , we used to have Village [ kibboetz or moshav] Radio and phone ,,, Even when i served in the army , my parents had no phone and when i was needed , my officers would call a neigbour who lived 10 houese away from my parents house , he would send one of his daughters to call me to the phone ,,, People are extremely resourcefull of making the best of what they have ... mirjam
Yes, I remember that now - duh !
It was a tape player, and I don't know how it was structured, just that she reported that she (thinking as an American) thought put these songs on tape and the villages can play them till the educational part sinks in, and one of the locals asked where the villagers were going to get the power to run the tape player? The next sentence in her e-mail was that they invented a solar-powered tape player, nothing about who or how.
So, I can't even tell you whether it was someone in the African end of the project or someone in the US end of the project who came up with the solution, only that this was another of her little anecdotes about how her Americanized assumptions were proven wrong ... NOT everyone in Africa has access to electricity or batteries.
And not every American makes those assumptions, only the ignorant ones.
Elizabeth
Maybe you should tell her about windups, sugar run batteries, etc etc. Perhaps she is behind the times.
Perhaps those items are not available in the part of Africa she was in. Otherwise, I'm sure the locals she was working with would have told her about them.
It was the locals who pointed out that the villagers had no electricity to power a tape player, and couldn't afford batteries, therefore, I assume the locals would have known if there was a non-battery one available, because some village would have had one that was proudly showed off, if such a thing existed in their local stores.
Read the rest of the paragraph. I'm told she was high maintenance before, and losing a child gave her the ability to be higher maintenance because now no one dares to be so mean as to say No to her demands.
As I'm told by her co-author, she has always (even before getting the special privileges awarded to authors) guilted people "you must do this or that because Boohoo, I lost my baby", and because in the US comparatively few people endure that, she has always gotten away with it because people will accept the guilt that her baby died and theirs is alive and well.
As her co-author told her, in the country their parents immigrated from, everybody loses babies, and she wouldn't be able to use that guilt trip because whoever she tried it on would simply say "so did I" and not think that she's entitled to special treatment because of it.
As I said, I met her only long enough to be introduced, so I don't have a personal opinion on her -- this is all the experience of someone who knew her for many years, both before and after the child died.
At the time they were doing the book signings, my friend the co-author was using either a cane or a wheelchair. It irked her that despite her own challenges, she would fetch her own stuff, if someone offered to bring her a Coke she'd give them change for the vending machine, and the other gal, who is in perfect physical health, was playing Queen and refusing to do or buy anything for herself. (And demanding that people give her stuff a lot more expensive than just a Coke.)
She was not "made" this way by the tragedy, it simply gave her an excuse to get away with what she'd always done to an even higher degree, and because it is so rare for a child to die in the US (as opposed to Third World countries where it's commonplace), she *does* get away with it. Like her co-author, I'm sure that if she pulled this stunt in a village where every mother has buried a baby (or two or three), someone would slap her upside the head instead of acting like she should be a candidate for sainthood.
And that's one reason our mutual friend didn't invite us to the same parties, because she knew that I don't play that game, and this other gal would ruin the party by throwing a full-fledged fit if she asked me to be her slave for the evening and I predictably refused to be guilted into it.
Years Ago People knew how to connect radios tapes etc.. to their CAR batteries ,,, I remember visited aquaintnaces who lived [in the 1950s] without electricity , light was from petrol lamps, she ironed with heating the iron on some coal construction , but every night they would attach the radio to the battery of their Tractor , to listen to the news !!!!! mirjam
Oh, I realize that I can't expect everyone else to be me. And that I'm fairly cynical about people, as an occupational hazard.
I spent 15 years doing auto accident defense, and one week doing auto accident plaintiff. I'm sitting there with a killer headache (but I didn't pass out when I tried to get out of bed, so I went to work even though I had to keep my eyes closed) and some plaintiff would call and expect sympathy because their knee hurts, they can't work because their knee hurts. And it would take every ounce of inner strength I had to refrain from telling them that my knee has hurt every damn day since July 1975, and I never used that as an excuse to not go to work. Nor did I sue over the accident that caused it. You take some Advil, you wrap an Ace bandage around it, you get on with life.
At the end of that one week of temp work, I made it clear to the office manager that while I very much liked the people working in their office, please don't call me to temp again, because I can't deal with the whiny plaintiffs who clearly haven't got a clue what it's like to work when you're sick and in intense pain. Let them walk a mile (or work a day) in my shoes and then see if they still thought they were so bad off.
I did much better on the defense side where I didn't have to listen to people a lot healthier than me tell me that they can't work and have to pretend to be sympathetic to their little aches and pains. (I can be quite sympathetic toward the people who are worse off than me, but not to someone who thinks they can permanently retire as a result of what we call "a band-aid injury".)
One of my bosses used to use my reaction to the medical records in his case evaluation. If I was rolling my eyes at what they thought we should believe prevented them from working, versus those cases where I was impressed enough to refer to "this poor guy". If I felt sorry for them, then he believed they really couldn't work.
And, for the record, the hardest thing I ever had to do in that job was to deliver the message that because the driver had the minimum insurance policy and most of the available money was going to the medical bills of the survivors, the poor woman's three dead babies were worth a grand total of $1000. To her credit, she accepted the check and signed the forms without screaming at me that they were worth a lot more, and her grace in the situation got her a totally unprofessional hug from both the notary and me (a hug we needed as much as she did, because we were both about to cry, but ethically we couldn't do anything more for her).
She had grown up in a place where you expected to lose several children, and with that ingrained into her, she was a lot more stoic about it than the two of us who grew up expecting 99.99% of babies to live. She was handling it better than the notary, who turned to me after the bereaved mother left and said "after that, I need a drink". Which didn't sound like a bad idea to me, either.
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