2012 - It was the Year of New Inventions

It all started when I got back from Mama Hussein’s farm after a week of helping her cook by an open fire in the hut which serves as the kitchen and felt as if I’d cough a lung up from all the smoke inhalation. I sympathized with the African Mamas who cook like this day in day out and thought that there must be a clean green solution for their cooking needs.

Research started using our sporadic internet between bursts of even more sporadic power cuts. I finally declared that solar was the way to go and promptly lost all hope seeing all the detailed plans with multiple angle conversions and sunlight distributors in them. Then I stumbled across a design that even we could achieve out here – the solar powered tyre cooker. After watching an informative u-tube clip Joelle and I set out with a couple of friends to reconstruct our very own solar cooker made from tyres, boxes and aluminium foil. Our first test of cooking rice wasn’t all that successful although we recorded temperatures of up to 180deg in our cooker. We then did some more research and successfully cooked bread, vegetable stew, meat stew and some undercooked muffins. As the sunny season disappeared the cooker was relegated to the balcony and served as a solar water heater for many months.

The second invention I stumbled across and became excited about was the no-electricity fridge. It consists of two large ceramic pots, one inside the other and a layer of sand in between that gets watered each day to provide the evaporative cooling effect. This is able to store fruit, vegetables and other food items in the same way as a fridge works. A few weeks later saw a friend and I lugging the pots onto a dalla dalla, transporting them the last km home cradled between ourselves and a motorbike taxi driver. The fridge set up, experiments started with tomatoes and it seemed that this is a winner, keeping tomatoes cold and fresh for up to 2 weeks instead of 3 days in the heat.

Next up was a solar hot water heater as our solar hot water just wasn’t cutting it on the roof. Black jerry cans were purchased and also a large black basin, which was covered in glass. Both worked to heat up water although the basin had a higher temperature. But overall the solar cooker won out and continued it’s delegated work of heating up the washing up water and bucket bath water when we couldn’t bring ourselves to bathe in cold water.

The invention that generated the most interest, however, was the bicycle powered washing machine. Not being so mechanically gifted myself I tend to find the invention and get others excited about it so that it gets off the ground. Since we had Paul, a very mechanically gifted Aussie man working in our garage at the time, it was he who ended up putting the plans into action. The first prototype washing machine consists of a small barrel attached to a handle that spins it on a horizontal plane. It is currently in the village being tested by a friend of mine and once tweaked we might make a larger machine that will be hooked up to a bicycle. It fulfills my standards of washing clothes although the real test will be if it lives up to Tanzanian standards, who often spend hours scrubbing and wringing their clothes to clean perfection.