Heading Out Friday for Uganda

 

Our team of five leaves Friday for Restoration Gateway in Uganda.  This is the site of I-TEC's second  Solar PowerPac.  The Mission has a hospital and a Dental Clinic that serves people in the Karuma area.  The mission has worked with orphaned children in Uganda for many years and provides a home atmosphere for children who have no other home.  They have established a way that people can adopt a child to assist in their housing.  There is a church on the property that is very active.  There are plans for a Ministry and Conference Center that will provide facilities for other missionaries to spend some quality and relaxing time away from their other commitments.  I-TEC is privileged to be a small part of this ministry in that we have been able to provide them with stable power for about five years now.  Please check out the mission website at "www.restorationgateway.org" to learn more about them.

The purpose of this trip is to connect the local Power Grid to this system that has been off-grid since the beginning.  The local utility has provided a transformer about 200' away from the PowerPac.  Our intention is to connect this power to the system with protective circuits that will keep "dirty" power from reaching the equipment.  Utilities in Africa are typically not stable and often power is interrupted at any time during the day and may even be non-existent for many hours at a time.  Our goal is to use the incoming power to recharge the battery bank whenever it is available. 

We received word that the transformer has been removed for repair and is expected to be back in place sometime next week.  This may or may not happen.  If we are not able to have power before we leave, we will still be able to install the underground cables and protection equipment and make as much preparation as possible for full connection.  We may need to send one or two technicians back to the site in January to finish tweaking the system if we are unable to do so this time.  

There are fivc men going this trip: Tom, Gary, Matt, John and Trey.  Four of us will leave from Harrisburg at 3:45PM on Friday and we will meet Trey in Newark after flying in from Tulsa, before heading to Brussels and then Entebbe, arriving there at close to midnight Sunday, which is 4PM Eastern Time on Sunday.  We would appreciate your prayers as we prepare for this trip.  Follow along with us as I will try to update often as long as internet is good.  We plan to return home Sunday evening, November 20.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Final Report

  November 24 th , 2022   It’s hard to believe that our team has left RG and are now enjoying Thanksgiving with family and friends.  We really missed Gary Smedl ey who was to be part of the team but n ow that we are all home, I want to not on ly thank Matt Aungst, John Bennetch and Trey Harper but also thanks to their wives and families who were holding down the home front.    Gary would have kept up with the Blog as he does so well , but he offered to post what we sent him to close out the RG blog.  Thanks Gary.    The promised arrival of the 100kva transformer never did materialize but we left it in God’s hands and are certain there was a reason it didn’t show up, unknown to our team   Our team of four was small, but w e divided up into three area’s of responsibility and were able to get almost everything done on our individual list.    John Bennetch spent the majority of his week work ing on the old , well used , 80 kw generat...
Read more

Real Challenges

As I said before, I had tried no less than four times to apply for a Visa for Uganda, to no avail.  Consequently, the airline could not allow me to fly to Uganda today and so I canceled my flights.  Since our flight from Harrisburg to Newark had been canceled, we had a driver from the church (Ken) who graciously agreed to drive the church van back from Newark after dropping us off.  Also, the Covid test result that John had was not allowed for the flight, so he ended up getting a Covid test in the airport and just making it to the gate in time for the flight.   We transferred equipment that I had in my baggage that was to go to the project into other bags and I even left my backpack to Matt to use for the next week.  The team of four now is on their way to Brussels and should arrive there in about four hours.   I am so sorry I was not able to resolve my Visa issue, but the Lord is in full control of all that has happened and of all that will happe...
Read more