Today was a special day in the master class. First of all, it was decided by the participants themselves to continue working on saturday. Whereas normally in such a training, saturday would be part of the free weekend. So we started this saturday at 8 am in the morning like every training day.
After tea-break we payed a short visit to the metereological institute of Singida, which is part of the Tanzanian Meteorological Agency (TMA). One participant in our group works for this governmental department in Dodoma, so he could easily arrange a visit. The observant on duty explained us the instruments they use to measure all kinds of meteorological parameters, like amount of rainfall, temperature and of course wind speed.
Back at the workshop, we suffered from the powercuts. The last couple of weeks Tanzania faces major deficit in power supply. The only solution for the national power company Tanesco is to distribute the available power over different areas at different time periods. Today the VETA workshop was in a schedule with no power between 8 am and 6 pm. Nevertheless we continued working with a generator that fails sometimes. At the end of the day we finished our first turbine. That gave a boost to the participans!
At 6 pm we planned to call it a day. And then the power was back again. With the 3-phase electricity from the grid, you can make good quality welding joints, which are not possible when using the (1-phase only) power from our generator. In stead of cleaning the workshop, most participants became enthousiastic to also finish the whole pole construction today, given this power opportunity. Around 8 pm, we left the workshop tired but very happy after 12 hours of work on a weekend day.