Wow. So, here I am about to leave. I have a less-than-ideal flight that leaves at 3:30 in the morning for Casablanca, but when I get there, I’ve set up a time to call my old and dear friend Fouad Abdelmoumni. Then on to Geneva, where I’ll see another old friend, Joanna Ledgerwood, and play the bizarre but addictive French card game Tarot, shop in a little French Sunday market, see lots of other old friends, and so on.

So, things went very well here, and we ended up getting everything we wanted, which was to have all our Malian partners be enthusiastic about the solar lamp project. There’s a lot of work still to be done, but I am strongly optimistic that things will work well. Here we all are, after this morning’s meeting where everyone came together to agree on the way forward.

Yesterday we drove down to the town of Bougouni, where we plan to start selling lamps – all of our partners happen to have offices there. One of our partners, MFC-Nyetaa, has started a rural electricity project designed to be run eventually on bio-fuel. They have three 100 kw generators, which can run on either bio-fuel or diesel. For the moment, they are burning diesel, and encouraging local farmers to grow jatropha, which is an easy to grow plant, that can be used for intercropping, and will grow on abandoned fields. Jatropha seeds, big hard brown and about the size of a marble, can be crushed and give off a substance that burns about like diesel fuel. It’s going to be years before they get enough jatropha production to drive the generators, and also probably years before they get enough people hooked up and able to pay the monthly electric bill, which has a minimum monthly payment of about $5.30, which is a lot for a poor family. For a lot of these people, the inexpensive solar lamp will be a better deal, starting at about $15, but requiring no monthly payments for a long time, since sunlight is free and there’s plenty of it here!

Anyway, here are my colleague and I at the generator, pretending to understand what the various gauges mean.

Something completely different were these three kids + two donkeys, delivering – well, I’m sure they would deliver just about anything!

Well, got more pix, but I’m falling asleep after too many long days and I’ve got a taxi coming in 21 minutes, which is about the time to upload another picture! Thanks, all, for your comments. I’ll do one more posting from Geneva, and at least get the other pictures up. Bye for now. Oh, one more thing. Piers Rippey, who some of you know, is on his way to go sailing in Alaska with our friends Jack and Carol McCreary. Piers has started a blog called the Grand Maritime Adventure. http://grandmaritimeadventure.wordpress.com/ Visit him if you like!

Paul