Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Solar and Natural Building

Public Transportation on lake Atitlan

On Monday we started work on our two major projects this week:  Installing solar panels on the CECAP school in Santa Cruz la Laguna, Guatemala and a natural building project in San Marcos.  

Santa Cruz Solar:

We started out with all 17 travelers + 8 local and Guatemalan team at the CECAP school.  Pat Torpie presented the work of Amigos de Santa Cruz, a nonprofit that supports local control and decision making.  Amigos is the type of NGO or nonprofit that ATC looks to partner with - very much in touch with the community they support + Amigos works to enhance local capacity.  

After presentations by Amigos and local natural building expert Charlie Rendall, we toured the facility.  There was a sudden burst of energy from the group.  We had been waiting for months to get to work and everyone started to pitch in just slightly ahead of the planned schedule.  After a brief moment of exuberant chaos, we divided into teams and one group stayed at CECAP to work on solar and the other group headed to San Marcos on a Lancha to start the natural building project.  

We inventoried the solar materials and found we had all of the important electronics components but the hardware for mounting the solar panels and electronics was missing.  We had to improvise.  

At the end of Monday we had a general idea of how to compensate for the missing hardware and we worked into the night to sketch out alternative design options.

San Marcos Natural Building:

More Soon!

For more information check out ATC volunteer Tina Watson's travel blog:  Guatemalatina


Photos:  Tina Watson - See her travel blog:  Guatemalatina

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