Well, with my erratic sleep schedule, it's a good thing that I'm not in a 9 to 5 gig anymore. I no longer work for Global Cycle Solutions, although I'm still involved with the company as an investor and a partner organization. I have switched to full-time work on AISE, which is exciting and lots of fun. AISE stands for Accelerating Innovations and Social Entrepreneurship and it is pronounced "I say".
Bernard and I have been working nearly full-time on this, and we now have a website and a logo (and I'm grateful to everyone who gave us feedback on it) and a Twitter handle, which makes it a lot easier to have meetings about our work. That is, it gives us a bit more legitimacy. We spoke with some folks at FoodWaterShelter here in Arusha today, and I rode half an hour outside of Arusha to the beautiful campus of Mt. Meru University in Ngaramtoni to meet with some potential partners. People are already really excited about our design curriculum and are asking when we will be offering sessions.
More often, though, we are in the workshop, working on a few different technologies. Bernard has a really cool pedal-powered drill press, so he's been working on finalizing the design for that. He also has an amazing system for producing drip irrigation kits, so we're going to be ready to test that soon. I've been working on my moringa oil press and also looking at a bicycle powered grain grinder. It's a bit unfocused, but we both work well when there's a lot going on. Also, if you noticed the "Technologies" tab on our website, as soon as all of this is more complete, we'll be putting it up there.
We are now on our way to Uganda for a pedal-power workshop with Amy Smith and David from Bikes not Bombs. We're really excited about the program (and I get to see Denis from IDDS again) and hopefully we'll have more exciting technologies coming out of it. From there, I'll be spending a couple of weeks in the states before coming back to Arusha to start running some outreach programs through AISE.
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