Going public

What a day! I had to be at the campus at 7:00 a.m. today to catch a ride over to the Soyapango campus with Reina, UDB's vice president of science and technology. At 8 I had a meeting with Nelson, Federico Machado, and Anslemo Valdizon to talk about the university's solar thermal electric system. The system is not getting much use, and we brainstormed ways to integrate it more into engineering curriculum and possible demonstration uses. I explained how we had done something similar with fuel cells as part of the H2E3 project, looking for ways to incorporate fuel cells into curriculum of existing engineering courses.

At 9 another meeting, this one with Rector Huguet, Jorge, Reina and Nelson to talk about the solar project for building #4 for which we are seeking funding from the Alianza para Energía y Medio Ambiente. I announced the good news that the science corner grant was approved, which got a happy reaction. The university folks really want to bring Peter Lehman down here for a visit to cement the relationship with Schatz Energy Research Center before I leave at the end of June.

Right after the meeting I called Peter and talked with him for almost half an hour. It looks like he is totally booked through May and June, so as an alternative we´re considering the two of us making a trip to El Salvador later, perhaps in July. It was exciting hearing news from home; among other things, Dan Kammen has been named by the Obama administration as a special energy envoy to Latin America.

In the afternoon I went to the Universidad de El Salvador to substitute for Rich Cairncross, who had to make a quick trip back to the U.S. this week. I gave a talk on fuel cells and demonstrated the SERC fuel cell/electrolyzer kit. I was really happy with how well the fuel cell worked this time; it seems to be improving with age. The students and faculty were great, giving me a warm reception and lots of logistical help.

Something about the UES campus feels very homey to me, maybe because it's a public university. It's more of an Oscar compared to UDB's Felix mojo, if that makes any sense.

Hey Dr. C., I stole your whole class. Whatcha gonna do about it, huh?

Clean energy from filthy trash

Yesterday I tagged along with Rich Cairncross's class from Universidad de El Salvador to see an under-construction landfill gas energy project. The Nejapa landfill is the only real sanitary landfill in the country, serving the area around San Salvador. This is not too shocking when you consider that San Salvador department alone, one of 14 departments that make up the country, generates more than half the country's solid waste. Metro San Salvador has about a quarter of the country's population, but I think the standard of living and thus the amount of trash generated per capita here is much higher than in the rest of the country.

Anyhow, the landfill was interesting. As usual with field trips to industrial sites, they gave you way more liberty to get up close and personal with the equipment than in the liability- and intellectual property-crazy USA. We got to get up on top of one of the huge landfill trash heaps (it's neatly covered with soil, so it's not messy or stinky) and see the network of wells and tubing that capture the landfill gas. Then we went to see the flares, which is how they are disposing of the gas while they develop the 6 MW power plant they plan to open next year (eventually to be ramped up to 20 MW). The most disgusting part of the landfill visit? The lixiviados (leachate) liquid that oozes out of the landfill and gets sprinkled over the surface of the landfill. The tour bus drove right through the sprinkler spray, motivating us to quickly shut all the windows!

UES students at the Nejapa landfill gas flare

In the evening I went to the U.S. Ambassador's residence for a social event featuring a jazz combo who are visiting El Salvador from the States. Good thing I bought a suit from the tailors down the street a couple weeks ago -- I'm already putting some miles on it. When I arrived at the party I was greeted with the good news that the Science Corner grant I wrote with the embassy's Carolyn Turpin has been awarded funding. This will give us $50,000 to start equipping Universidad Don Bosco's renewable energy research center.

I also got to meet several other people associated with the embassy, including the country director of  the Millennium Challenge Corporation. They're putting in off-grid renewable energy systems for rural homes in out-of-the-way corners of the country. I'm hoping he can set me up an opportunity to visit some of these systems and see how people are living with them.

Today I went to see an ear nose and throat specialist (in Spanish an otorrinolaringólogo - one of the most amazing words I've come across in this language). He found some inflammation in both of my ears and prescribed me some anti-inflammatory medicine and a medication that suppresses the involuntary eye movements that make vertigo so disorienting. He also recommended some head and neck movement exercises that he says will help. He thinks I'll get over the vertigo in a few more days.

Locals only

Today Basilia and her mom and I wanted to go to the beach, something we hadn't done for months. We considered playing it safe and going to El Tunco, a beach we've already been to twice. It's easy to get to, we know we like it, and we have friends there we could look up. However, I successfully lobbied for trying someplace new, so we took a considerably longer bus trip to go to Playa Los Cóbanos.

Like the Lonely Planet guidebook says, it's a beautiful place, but we were kind of taken aback by how crammed the beachfront was with snack shacks, restaurants, and ranchos (the Salvadoran name for little open-air huts you can rent for a day to have some shade and a place to ditch your stuff while you swim -- elsewhere in Latin America known as palapas). We eventually found some good food and had a nice afternoon at the beach, but the consensus is we like El Tunco better. Los Cóbanos does have the distinction of having the only coral reefs on the Pacific Coast of Central America, but we didn't get around to renting snorkel gear to go check it out.

To me the most interesting aspect of Los Cóbanos was that, of the hundreds of beach-goers, we didn't see anyone but yours truly (I love the Spanish equivalent for "yours truly" to refer to oneself: "su servidor") who appeared to not be Central American. Since the place is evidently not catering to the foreign tourist trade, it has this intense kind of Salvadoran-ness about it. All the grittiness of a public marketplace in the city, right up to the waterline. Kind of fascinated and repulsed us at the same time -- lively but not the relaxing experience we were looking for.

When we got back to Antiguo Cuscatlán, we found our neighbors the tailors had made a Barcelona soccer shirt for their dog. Salvadorans are nuts about Spanish soccer teams, mainly Real Madrid and Barcelona, but this was the first time we'd seen this particular expression of fandom.

Basilia with Barcelona Fan

Some real work for a change

Today Basilia, her mother and I all participated in a volunteer day with Habitat for Humanity. The volunteers were organized by an employee of the U.S. embassy, so we all gathered outside the embassy at 7 a.m. There were several private vehicles and a bus owned by the U.S. Navy, who have a small base at the main airport in Comalapa. The three of us rode on the Navy bus, along with several Navy personnel and a mix of other volunteers. Mostly people from the U.S., but a few Salvadorans in the group.

The job site was in Santa Ana department, a little over an hour from San Salvador. Habitat is building an entire neighborhood. Many of the homes are already finished and occupied, and the neat upkeep of the homes and the gardens that surround them suggest that the residents take a lot of pride in these little houses.

I give Habitat a lot of credit for how they organize their volunteer events. Unlike many events I've participated in with other organizations in the past, they are great at giving everyone something useful to do and keeping people happy with details like bathroom access, drinking water, first aid kits, etc. Also, they put us to work side by side with Salvadoran paid laborers, with whom we had a great time chatting.

The plan was to work a full day, but just before lunch a team who were digging one of the foundations encountered human remains. It appeared to be a clandestine burial from several years earlier. The Habitat leaders decided to notify the police and suspend construction for the rest of the day. I think many of us were relieved, since the heat was brutal. A full day would have been a tough deal.

Habitat for Humanity mason Mirna, Basilia, and Doña Basilia assemble rebar for a house foundation

On Wednesday I participated in a round table discussion on renewable energy at Universidad Centroamericana. There was a good turnout, mostly university students. Like other panel discussions I've seen here, it differed from typical panels in the U.S. in that 1) there was no attempt to stimulate discussion or give and take between the panelists after our initial presentations, and 2) instead of asking questions of the panel, most audience members used the Q and A period to give short speeches stating their opinions on the topic. You can see the Powerpoint presentations online (look for "Energías Renovables en El Salvador: ¿Cuales son las alternativas?")

Other universities and vertigo

Yesterday sounded like it was going to be pretty lightweight, just giving two 40-minute presentations at two universities (Univ. Católica de El Salvador in Santa Ana and Univ. José Matías Delgado in Santa Tecla) as part of the U.S. embassy's Earth Week events. It turned out to be a marathon day, leaving the house at 7:15 a.m. and not getting home until almost dark. No huge surprises, just the usual random delays, meeting lots of people, getting from place to place...

The presentations were fun, Rich Cairncross and I tag-teaming. He talked about his biodiesel production research at Drexel, using ethanol in place of methanol in the transesterification/esterification process and other adjustments that could make production more cost-effective and/or more environmentally benign. I talked about renewable energy in El Salvador and the need for a renewable energy research institute. The students, mostly agronomy and industrial engineering majors, were very receptive and asked good questions. One thing that impressed me was that about half of the students at both universities were women. I hope this translates into women being well-represented in the technical workforce and enjoying equal status and pay with their male counterparts.

With Rich at UNICAES

One funny incident at Univ. J.M. Delgado: I was introduced to the director of the school of industrial engineering, and she commented that we had already met before. She looked very familiar to me, but I couldn't place it. Later, after the presentations, she asked me "when are we going to sing again?" and it came back to me -- she was one of the other engineers who sang karaoke the night I went with Nelson to an engineering society get-together a couple months ago! She was a great singer, both in English and Spanish.

I think I have something called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. I had this intense sensation of vertigo or dizziness as I got out of bed Sunday morning (no, I didn't get wasted Saturday night!). The first wave was so strong it made me throw up. I throw up like once every ten years, so that in itself was kind of disturbing. I canceled plans Basilia and I had made to go out with our friends Francisco and Kyle so I could stay home and rest. The vertigo has recurred a few times but seems to be subsiding. I looked online and found the link above, which I think pretty much nails what I've got. Sounds like I don't need to rush to see a doctor unless the nausea and vomiting come back. Otherwise I feel fine but am taking a day off work to rest. I have some prep work to do for another presentation tomorrow at the Universidad Centroamericana, but I think it will just basically be a truncated version of yesterday's presentations.

Juggling and a guitar

We had fellow Fulbrighter Rich Cairncross over for dinner last night. He'd had us over to his place the week before. Turns out in addition to being a biodiesel expert and an all-around nice guy, Rich has also been a juggler for the past twenty years. He brought over his diabolos and gave us a very impressive demonstration and a lesson. A diabolo looks like two toilet plunger cups mounted back to back on a short common axle. The object is to keep it spinning on a string that connects two sticks you hold in your hands, while you do crazy tricks. I'm working on flipping the diabolo in the air and catching it on the string. Like so many things, much harder than the expert makes it look.

I wanted my mother-in-law Basilia to see Rich do some "conventional" juggling as well, but he didn't have any jugglable objects with him, so I gave him three pairs of my (clean) socks, and he went to town. Good show, Rich. Basilia the younger seems to have a knack for the diabolo and is interested in getting a handle on juggling as well.

Rich Cairncross (clad in his official Fulbright t-shirt) juggles socks in our living room

I tried to contribute something to the talent show by getting out my guitar. I have to say I'm having a harder time than I used to remembering entire songs. Now that I'm done with the teaching part of my project, I hereby resolve to spend a little time playing guitar every day so I can knock some of the rust off.

Mango Time

Mango season is here, and boy are we happy.

Outside the skins are still green, but inside this sweet, fluorescent orange flesh!

No waiting for your smoothie at this Sonsonate bus terminal

Renewable energy class postmortem

The dust has had a couple weeks to settle since my renewable energy class ended. I've finally finished grading all the students' papers and digesting their written course evaluations. I think the news is mostly good. The students gave positive evaluations overall, and their oral presentations during the last class session were quite good. All but one student said they would recommend the class to their colleagues, and the question about whether the technical level of the class was too basic or too easy generated a bell curve suggesting I aimed it about right. There were definitely some criticisms of the class, but they were on the whole constructive. Reading them I felt like they were mostly things I could address successfully if I were to teach more courses at UDB.

The most discouraging outcome of the class for me was in the students' written work. Not a big surprise, given my sense of the level of emphasis given to teaching writing in Central America, but there were some serious deficiencies, even after two rounds of draft papers that I commented on. Here are a few things I keep seeing:

• Plagiarism in many forms. Mostly simple oversights like failure to cite sources of graphs, tables, and qualitative statements in the text, but there were two separate instances of teams turning in papers with paragraphs on end of text copied straight from sources I had little trouble tracking down on the web. Worse, one of the papers was submitted by a team that included three UDB engineering instructors. Come on guys!
• Failure to integrate information from multiple sources into the report. The students were good at chasing down relevant facts and illustrative graphics, but they tend to just stick these things into the report without explaining them or drawing meaningful relationships between the elements. 
• Failure to provide units with data. This one drives me crazy! 187,000 whats?
• Use of significant figures. Make that 187, 418.003 whats.
• Failure to use consistent formatting throughout document. This is somewhat understandable in group project reports, but I should have recommended that each team designate an overall editor to ensure continuity and consistent format.

I've started communications with a couple of fellow gringos with experience teaching in Latin America to pick their brains about these issues and how they've dealt with them. I'm considering approaching the university administration with the idea of a mandatory one-day workshop for incoming master's students (and maybe a similar workshop for faculty) on "how to succeed in grad school" that would address the issues listed above. Many students and instructors have told me they want to go to the U.S. to get a master's or PhD; building these skills would be essential for them to succeed in a U.S. university.

This past Saturday I taught a half-day workshop on hydrogen and fuel cells for UDB renewable energy grad students. It was a lot of fun. We did some efficiency calculations using the H2E3 fuel cell/electrolyzer kit I brought from Humboldt, and went through (well, most of the way through; time ran out...) a fuel cell sizing exercise I translated into Spanish from the HyTEC curriculum SERC developed with Lawrence Hall of Science. The students seemed to really enjoy themselves too. Only one kit to play with, but I did my best to involve them in operating it and doing the calculations.

Sunday Basilia and I went on a bus trip to Juayua in the western mountains. Lots of good street food, some cooler weather, and more elbow room than crowded, traffic-clogged San Salvador.

Graduation, Semana Santa, and back again

OK, I know the gaps are getting longer, but that trend should reverse now. The week before last I was busy finishing teaching my renewable energy class, then last week Basilia and I went to Honduras for Semana Santa (Holy Week), where we were happy to be far away from computers and the internet.

The last day of the course, March 25, I had invited fellow Fulbrighter Rich Cairncross to bring his renewable energy students over from the Universidad de El Salvador to watch my UDB students give their final presentations on their group research projects. The timing worked out nicely, as the last week of my class was the first week of Rich's class, and his class meeting times were coincidentally the same as ours - Tuesdays and Thursdays starting at 2 pm. This gave my students an enlarged audience and hopefully gave Rich's students some food for thought. My students worked in six teams and tackled the following topics, all with a focus on El Salvador:

• connecting small renewable energy systems to the grid
• generating energy from solid waste
• incentives and subsidies for renewable energy
• ocean energy
• biomass energy
• the future of renewable energy in El Salvador

I was impressed with the students' presentations, though they nearly all went on quite a bit longer than their allotted times! This plus the last-minute addition of an engaging presentation on biomass energy by a visiting professor from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid made the class end much later than scheduled. But it was a happy end to the course. The university kindly provided a bit of a party with snacks and drinks after the four-plus hour marathon of presentations.

Class photo on graduation night (a few folks had to leave before we took the photo)

Two days later Basilia and I set out for our week off in Honduras. We took a bus north to the border at El Poy, then another on to Santa Rosa de Copán, where we happened upon a coffee festival on the town square with some beautiful live music. After a couple hours our niece and nephew, Celenia and Hernán, showed up on their bus from Tegucigalpa, just in time for us all to catch the last evening bus to Gracias.

Musicians at the coffee festival in Santa Rosa de Copán

We spent three nights in Gracias at the pretty, comfy Guancasco hotel, terraced onto a hillside below an old Spanish fort. The first morning we hitch-hiked out to the Lenca village of La Campa and caught the Palm Sunday outdoor mass. The next day we hiked up into Celaque National Park, seeing a bit of cloud forest that's similar to but much more intact and extensive than what remains in Guajiquiro. In the evening we took a moto-taxi out to a municipal hot springs a couple miles outside town.

Palm Sunday mass in La Campa

Next day we caught a bus to La Esperanza, a small highland city with a cool climate that's always been a favorite Honduran town for me. We just spent a couple hours there before getting another bus on to Marcala, another place I'm always happy to hang out. We spent a night at Basilia's sister Argelia's house, then caught a ride up to Guajiquiro with Argelia's family in their pickup.

Guajiquiro was tranquil and pretty as always. We spent three days there, not doing much but a couple of hikes in the surrounding countryside and sitting around talking with Basilia's family and eating. The highlight was an invasion of the town's new pool hall. Pool halls in Central America are almost universally understood to be off-limits to women. I said to Basi half-jokingly that she should take her sisters and nieces over to play pool. She thought it was a great idea and organized the womenfolk. It turned out to be a great success. Her sisters Argelia and Oneyda, who had never played before, especially had a wild time. The men all seemed to either get a laugh out of it or tried to ignore the fact that one of the two tables was being dominated by women. Argelia's and Oneyda's husbands came by briefly to check it out and were supportive, which I was happy to see.

Basilia takes a shot while her sister Argelia, niece Lourdes, brother's girlfriend Marta, and niece Edy look on

Basilia and I headed back through Marcala, where we got to visit with our old friend Gloria Urquía, whom I used to work with at the nonprofit INADES when I was a Peace Corps volunteer a dozen years ago. She's still doing good work in the community.

Basilia's mom accompanied us back to El Salvador and is here visiting with us now. I'm back on the job, heading into uncharted waters now that the class is over.