Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Haiti Trip - Monday

Each morning after breakfast, Brett comes and meets us in the Holiday House and will lead us through a Bible study in Ephesians.  It’s a good study as he does a good job of including everyone and going through the Scripture steadily.  He’s a good teacher for our small group.
Today we started with a newly constructed generator building.  Inside the building are three new generators, panels and transfer switches in boxes, and unmarked underground feeders that serve the new underground distribution system for the campus.  Unfortunately, one of the generators was dropped and will not work due to the damage it received.  Further, a plastic fuel port on the fuel filter on the other two is broken and they won’t work.  But the same fuel port on the dropped generator is not broken (?) and if we move this one to one of the two that were not dropped then we can start one when we are ready.  This is very typical for Haiti, find and fix and make it work somehow.
All the walls are blank in the building.  There is no distribution, no connection between the generators and the distribution.  Our purpose is to construct the distribution inside the building so the power can reach those who need it.  We are, in a way, “filling in the gap”, to use spiritual parlance.  We plan then to test the distribution to verify that there are no shorts in the underground system prior to pushing the breakers to the “On” position.


We got some of the distribution from the generator breakers overhead to the manual switch locations and mounted most of the panel enclosures.  The ground rods are also all beat into the ground and a ditch is half dug for the grounding conductor.  We find out quickly that we don’t have enough 1 ¼” cable connectors and in order to use 1 ½” cable connectors we need to drill a 1 ½” hole in the panels and we don’t have a 1 ½” hole saw.  I’m sure we’ll find a way to make it work.
At night after dinner, our team gathers together and we play card games.  We do this until just before 9:00 which is about when the main power is turned off for the campus.

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