1st installation

I'm incredibly behind with this whole blog posting thing, so I'm going to do my best over the course of this week in Managua to catch up.  Also, I realize that my posts have been way too long.  I think that the first few days I was rather overcome with all the things that were going on, and felt like writing them all down in great detail.  From now on, no more epic narrative!

So anyhoo... the first installation:

Woke up at 4:30 a.m. and drove out to the first village.  At a crossroads we met up with a man on a motorbike, who led us to the first village.  The road to the village was less of a road than a dirt path crossed with a gully.  The gully was set into the side of the mountain at an angle that caused all of our gear to slide backward in the truck bed, effectively pinning my feet against the tailgate, until I was able to pull them free, and then assume a position on top of the batteries.   At the village, I found out that this whole time, Isaac had been capable of speaking a little English, as he explained, “You working with me!”  Our job was to install the panel on the roof, which was actually quite simple.  Connect the positive and negative cables to their respective terminals on the panel, attach the prefabricated aluminum supports, and run the ground cable to a copper rod driven into the ground.  Working on a corrugated tin roof is interesting.  If you step in the wrong places, your weight can bend (or in corroded places crack) the tin, so you can only step on places where you see nails, screws, or other fasteners that were used to mount the tin to the crossbeams of the roof.  I drilled a hole through the tin for each support, slid in a bolt, and then from inside, Isaac held another wrench so that I could tighten it down.  After this, we ran the cable inside through another hole, and got off the roof.  At this point, Isaac let me loose to go set up the panels on the church while he, Jim, and Emilio finished the internal wiring.  The whole installation here consists of one panel on a house, and two on the roof of the church, taking about 4-6 hours.  Let me tell you, there is no hotter place on earth than the top of a tin roof in the Nicaraguan countryside.  When I finally came down off the church roof after installing the two panels, Jim was looking at me very strangely.  I asked what the problem was and he told me that my face was quite literally beet red.  No surprise, because it was at least  150 degrees on that roof.  I couldn’t let my skin come in contact with the tin, because it would burn, and at one point when I set the wrench down for 5 minutes, I had to wrap my hand in my shirt before I picked it up, because it had become so hot.  Luckily, a liter of water and a 20 minute lunch break later I cooled down.