We did it!
The students from the Yombo Vocational Training Center have to live with a disability. But this doesn’t mean that they are disabled in general, or even worse: ‘un-able’ in general. That’s what we have proven with this outstanding performance. In the past two weeks students, teachers and instructors from ‘I Love Windpower’ have worked together intensively. We started with pure building materials from scratch. Slowly parts of the wind turbine were emerging. After one and half week the wind turbine was ready and tested on a low tower at the school. And a few hours ago, we erected the turbine on the tower that we also build ourselves.
Yesterday we went to the site, where the turbine is installed (CCBRT-hospital in Msasani area on the Peninsula). An 18 meter tower was erected with the whole group. Well, the group is now more than 30 students, so we made small teams which roulated during the installation of the tower. This tower has guy-wires on 3 levels. That took us a full day, which is quite normal when you see the complexity of this type of tower.
Today, we had some frustration when the electric wires were blocked by the bolts which connect the individual pipes of the tower. Maybe just bad luck, because normally it is not a big deal. In the end, the wires passed the obstacles and we continued the installation. It was already getting dark when finally the turbine went up. After releasing the brake, it speeded up in the usual way. There was no time yet to measure the amount of produced power. However, this will become clear the next days.
There have been so many fantastic moments in this training that it is difficult to write a small weblog about it. The inspiring moments are the ones, in which I see the students working together smoothly as a team. The Vocational Training Center is a boarding school, so they all know each other very well. They perfectly realize the possibilities and difficulties of their friends. It is just impossible to generalize the way they work together, therefore I’ll give an example of today. Robert is walking on his knees when he is out of his tricycle. He is amazingly fast on his knees. I am now completely used that his face is half a meter lower than you would expect, but other people stare at him when I walk together with him. He is very intelligent, and a kind of leader to the less smart. Most of the students with a mental disability somehow know of themselves that they need to pay attention to their friends when it comes to difficult tasks, so they will take Robert serious on these occasions. This is just one example. On our website, we will publish interviews we did with some students. The stories they are telling will grab your full attention…
