Day of Electrification

Shingo is a small village with 3 houses and a small monastery. We were 2 teams, one taking care of house-3 and other team takes care of house-1,2 and the monastery. We did a survey a day before and came out with a need of 24 LED bulbs (3W, 300 lumens). We woke up early today and after a review by Paras, few people of our team-2 (Bhavya, Nick, Nadine, Major) started setting up the panels while I was with David, Xenai, Coco and Bharat doing the wiring part in house no.3. We had 24 sockets to be set. Among all the jokes me and David cracked while doing our fittings, it was worth appreciating how Xenia and CoCo managed to fix up all the sockets well in time :P

Meet Nadine. A confused soul of our generation, as we all are at some point in life. It was inspiring to know to explore herself she has already planned a quit from her job. She was in my team giving her inputs as an Architect. I will remember the UNO sessions we (Nadine, Nobby, Me and Pranay) had each night of GHE. And I learned few other games from them Ming Mang Mong and RST(I played embarrassingly bad in each of them :P)

Frankly speaking, I didn’t expect it to be that easy. But that’s how a DC solar microgrid setup is. A solar panel, a charge controller, a battery and the electrical fittings, that’s it! no rocket science. The engineers took care of connecting batteries and charge controller.

Nalini and Drumi.. besides the panels they just cemented..

David, Coco and Xenia.. fixing sockets..

While Bhavya and other super humans fixed the street lamp, I went aroun to talk with the villagers.

Meet Kareem, from the sultanat of Oman. An entrepreneur with huge passion towards community service. Most enthusiastic about GHE. Also meet Pranay and Nobby, the Mumbaikars. Pranay is an Investment analyst while Nobby has trying his hands in his family business. They all were part of team-1 fixing sockets at house-2.

I went to a village house. The village women expressed her gratitude and told how important light is in their life. She was really courtageous as she offered a cup of tea with biscuits when I visited her. Our guide Mr.Wangdu helped to translate what she said.

Later I took a dip in the cold cold stream that flowed below which was refreshing.
After a test trial we got update from the team, the grid and all lighting was working fine. We were all happy and ready for the showdown. At 7.45PM, it was time to turn on the lights, one by one in all the houses. It was amazing to see the smiles everywhere.

The villagers were all dressed up in their traditional attires. The drums rolled and they all danced on their ladakhi songs (‘shab’ I heard time and again). Later the village women sat and sung few more songs (apparently hundreds of year old) and then they also danced. I was surprised by the energy of few really old women that danced along with all.

The celebration dance..

 The ‘Channg’ (local drink) and an amazing dinner made it a night of lifetime. There were local rum bottles on table for us, but we can’t afford to have these tonight. The news was, we have to again cross the Gandela pass at 5000+ mtrs tomorrow as the route further is blocked by a landslide. So we just sipped little rum and danced on our songs. The villagers waited patiently for the party to get over to start their dinner. It was a great gesture they showed towards their guests for the night.

temptations..