A letter-posting adventure

The little post office in the village let us send our Christmas cards okay, but wouldn't take my Mum's birthday present (something about it being too expensive(?!) - we never quite worked out what the problem was...), so it had to be taken to the main office in the next big town:



















Here is the most excellent sign that greets you as you enter:



















Passing beneath this ambitious declaration you enter a large hall with a huge counter stretching around you on 3 sides. The counter has at least a dozen different service points, each labelled for a different purpose - stamps, letters, parcels, tax payments, gas bill payments, earthquake payments*, etc, etc.

At the counter you don't queue so much as generally barge in to whatever's happening at the time (thankfully it was pretty quiet when we were there, or I don't think we would have managed!). Behind the counter are lots of men, at least two-thirds of them drinking tea or generally not doing anything visibly useful.

After visiting at least three of the windows and flagging down one or two of the idle men, we had to go and find a quiet corner somewhere to apply the stupendous number of stamps required to get the parcel to its destination.

Behold:



















And that's just one side of the parcel! Apparently the largest denomination of stamp they have is Rs25** - around 19p.

The letters get posted into the appropriate box in the spectrum of colours below, and the parcel gets handed to yet another disturbed-from-not-doing-much little man behind yet another counter.

I hope it arrives okay...



















(*We think payments out to earthquake victims, rather than payments for the services of earthquakes. Still, you never know.)

(**I'm sure I've seen Rs30 ones, but apparently not on this day.)

On call...

I had my first on call the weekend before Christmas and I’m very grateful that it’s over for a month.

One patient made me feel like I was participating in a melodramatic soap opera as she told me about the “bahot ziada taklif, doctor saab” (big trouble) that she was experiencing. I could feel myself becoming equally flamboyant as the consultation went on in my attempts to assure her I thought that she was probably going to be alright. (She was.)

One patient came in semi-conscious with at least 10 accompanying relatives who all wanted to talk to me at once. He hadn’t eaten his medicine or applied his injections for 2 weeks (a literal translation from the Urdu) and that isn’t very good for you when you have diabetes.

One baby died on Sunday after struggling for nearly 2 weeks. She had pneumonia and despite our best efforts she didn’t have the strength to fight it any more. The anguish of her mother haunts me as they wrap up the small still body, now peaceful.

Fruit and veg

All this for the grand total of Rs 180 (£1.36) - not bad!

Horsepower

How many horsepower can your toilet paper boast?



















I'm not sure what their point is, but it's still a pretty awesome brand name...

Jo's Birthday Cake

And it tasted good too....

Lepidoptery 6

Another brilliant batch of beautiful butterflies (previous episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5):

A Blue Pansy - a different variant from the last one, I think - most of these pics are from a few weeks ago before it got cold, but there are still quite a few of these guys left hanging on even after most of the other species have died off or migrated somewhere warmer:



















A Dark Clouded Yellow:

























A Common Wall:



















A Lime Butterfly - these ones get up to a fairly impressive 10cm wingspan - there were dozens of them enjoying some big red-flowered bushes at a motorway service station on the way to Lahore:



















And another one dreaming wistfully of freedom. Or something. It could be an elegant poetic portrayal of the tragedy of locking up something so beautiful or somesuch, were it not for the fact that the other three sides of the room were open to the fresh air. Stoopid insect:



















A Plain Tiger at our conference in Lahore last month (well, not at the conference, but you know what I mean):



















And from just the other day, apparently still braving the coldness, the grandly titled Queen of Spain Fritillary:

SWH prototype project part 4 - a bigger tank

See also previous instalments.

A solution to the leaking tank problem:



















We lined the box with some plastic sheeting* and after a few unsuccessful attempts found a way of connecting the tubes in a non-leaking manner using a short length of metal pipe and those metal hose ties you tighten up with a screwdriver. But then it was time to think a little bigger.

(*One of the recurring issues we have here is the question "what is this made of?". Will it melt? Dunno. Will it degrade over time? No idea. Will dangerous chemicals leach into the water? Who can tell? (Don't worry, this is only a temporary solution, and no-one will be drinking the water!) At the bazaar WYSIWYG applies, but that's only any use for those properties measured using the eyes and/or fingertips.)

Also, behold Peter, engineering student from NZ who is over for 6 weeks. In that Christian community small world way, it turns out he knows one of our friends from home...

And now behold one of our workshop buddies, ignoring all health-and-safety notions in true Pakistani style. While this photo doesn't belong here in any kind of thematic sense, it does in a camera-memory-card-chronological sense, and it looked cool. So there.



















So here's baby tank's big brother in situ, constructed in a similar manner (wood frame supporting polystyrene insulation lined with plastic sheeting). This one contains about 59 litres, including the water in the panel and tubes. As you can see, in its current position, the sun disappears behind a tree around 2.30pm, so we've got a bit of repositioning to do.

And here is a pretty rainbow-coloured graph depicting the other day's temperature variations - this tank got up to around 45°C, which is a fair bit lower than the small tank (as you would expect), but actually represents nearly a 3-fold increase in the amount of useful energy harvested. (Lower tank temp means lower heat losses, and this tank has a relatively smaller surface area to lose heat from.)

Towards the end of the day we got round to drilling a hole in the top of the panel so we could measure the panel temperature, hence the blue line appearing at the right hand side.



















To be continued...

Nativity - Doctor Who style...

The wise men are clearly Ood. That is all.

Chocolate Caramel Disaster

One of my favourite sweet treats is millionaire’s shortbread (also known as chocolate caramel shortbread). There’s something about that combination of biscuit, soft caramel and a good thick layer of chocolate (preferably dark) that is just sublime.

So, I’ve been trying to make it.

Attempt 1
I’m not sure what exactly went wrong but I suspect that it may have something to do with the inability of our gas stove to do a low heat. The recipe said to boil up the sugar, condensed milk and butter for 5 minutes, but after this amount of time my caramel layer turned out to be filling-extractingly solid. It was edible, but hard work on the jaw.
















Attempt 2
So then I tried a different method for my caramel, the boil-a-tin-of-condensed-milk-in-a-pressure-cooker-for-30-minutes method. This time the caramel has turned out so soft you need a spoon to eat it with. Again it’s edible, but somehow not quite right.

So, any tips or recipe suggestions for attempt 3 gratefully received....

Euphemisms and pregnancy

People are very polite about pregnancy here and the subject would certainly never be discussed with men present. However, a lot of the women I see in the clinic are either pregnant or wanting to be, so I’m rapidly the myriad number of ways to tell someone you’re expecting a baby in urdu.

Hamla is the adjective that means you’re pregnant, (this is the same word used for attack!).

Kuch hai literally means "is there anything" but shouldn't be used unless you do want to ask someone if they're pregnant.

Bacha pate mey is a bit rough and ready and literally means “baby stomach in”.

Bimar is the word for being ill, but also colloquially used for having a baby (or incidentally, your monthly period). As you can imagine, there is considerable potential for confusion.

Bacha honevala hai which seems to be less commonly used but I think would literally translate as “baby to be coming is”.

And finally, umeed se hai, which means that “there is hope”, perhaps the nicest I think.

SWH prototype project part 3 - it lives!

Work on the solar water heater felt like it had ground to a halt somewhat this week due to one thing or another, but yesterday we finally got it moved out of the workshop and into the sun on the other side of the compound. (This was no small operation, our ridiculously overweight panel taking 5 men to lift, with considerable effort - we're going to have to rethink the idea of putting it on the laundry roof!)

This is very much a "lets-just-see-if-it-works"-type test, and thus has all sorts of caveats and problems built in from the word go. The first one being that as soon as the plastic piping we used to connect it up warmed up slightly, its flexibility increased, and it sagged, immediately preventing the thermosyphon effect from taking place.

(A quick lesson: In order for the water to circulate by itself, the piping must be 'uphill' all the way from the lowest point of the loop to the highest. Then, as the water is heated in the panel, it becomes less dense and rises up, whilst the denser, colder water in the tank sinks down the other side of the loop into the bottom of the panel. The water heats up a little more on each cycle through the panel, gradually raising the temperature of the tank water. The neat thing about this setup is that at night the circulation stops naturally once the panel temperature drops below the tank temperature, thus preventing the panel from radiating away all that heat you've carefully collected - and no valves or pumps required.)



















Problem 1 solved (for the time being at least):



















A most encouraging sight (hot water entering the tank - click on the picture for a larger, clearer view):

























Problem number two. This impromptu water tank is made from a polystyrene cold box I found lying around. I knew it was going to leak, but it managed nearly a day-and-a-half before it became a problem - more than enough for the first try:



















It's also a very small volume for this panel, around 13 litres including the water in the pipework. The next step will be to make a tank bigger than this, yet smaller than the big blue behemoth - perhaps around 50 litres, with decent insulation, so we can gather some more useful data from it.

And on that subject, oh for a nice datalogger and some thermistors! At the moment I have 3 glass/liquid thermometers of slightly dubious accuracy, which I obviously have to directly observe every time I want a reading.

Still, we hit 63°C after a couple of hours, which is nice. It was too hot for me to rescue my thermometer by hand when I accidentally dropped it into the tank.

Projects for the next few weeks:

• make a ~50 litre insulated tank.
• move panel another 20 yards so it's not shaded at certain times in the afternoon.
• give it some legs to prop it up at the right angle so it's actually pointing at the sun.
• build a platform for the water tank to sit on.
• connect it up with some proper pipework.
• run some day-long and week-long tests.
• work out how on earth to strip about 50% of the weight out of the design!

SWH prototype project part 2

Yesterday I finally got the panel connected up and heating some water, but before I recount that story in the next post, I thought I'd better fill you in on the rest of the panel-building. Here's the panel innards more-or-less complete, after much sledghammering and much nut-and-bolting:



















And now painted black and dropped into the outer frame:



















Our spray-paint claims to be flat black, but it does have a distinctly satin finish to it. Better than straight gloss, but I think we'll shop around for a bit longer next time.

Two layers of glazing in place, and in the process of being secured down:



















We sliced up some old tyre innertubes for use as gasket material. 6" x 4" sheets of glass are not easy to work with, and contribute to this thing weighing far too much. We managed to get both sheets in with only one small corner damaged, however.

Next, we 'reclaimed' this unused water tank from the roof of the operating theatre:



















This one is actually far too huge for our prototype panel, and will be more suited for when we have the much bigger array of panels for the laundry. Perhaps we'll be able to run it at quarter volume or so for now.

Because it'll (hopefully) be holding warm water, we have to get some insulation around it:





















This is a start using what we had lying around, but I think we'll have to make a few improvements to it before we use it for real. All this wood has been used at least once before - removing all the old nails and so on adds at least the same amount of time and effort again as the actual construction does.

On to the testing...

Product placement and outrageous claims

A couple of things that stand out when you're shopping or driving around town here are the random product placements and outrageous advertising claims (even more outrageous than those we get at home, that is).

My favourite example so far is on the packaging of a toy car in our local grocer's shop, which says of the slightly bulbous Renault Scenic clone contained within: "It can make magical music and gives out wonderful light and imitates the sound of horses". Yes please.

And here's one from our dining table at the intezam (where we go for our lunches during the week):



















Those are some bold claims for a humble teabag, but it's the last two lines which seal its geniusness in my opinion. I'm tempted to request a reference, just to see which famous scientist/politician/celebrity writes back, and what they have to say to support these wonderful claims.

And one from our fridge:

I'm especially fond of the "get ready to embrace a life full of joy" bit, and the last sentence: "We collect milk daily from thousands of farmers across Pakistan to end your search for the complete all purpose milk with a promise of a life full of life."

A life full of life? I'll take some.

(There is something slightly too-good-to-be-true about this milk though - opened cartons have been known to last 10-11 days without even beginning to smell or taste off... It is UHT I suppose, but still, it's a bit spooky.)

It's also fairly normal practice for the badge on your vehicle not to match its make - Toyota being the high class manufacturer in these parts results in many Bedfords (and Bedfrods, interestingly), Daewoos and Suzukis being proudly emblazoned with the "ovally T" of Toyotaness. Oh, and we saw a suzuki minivan with beautiful BMW hubcaps the other day too.

And finally for today, it's strangely pleasing to note the number of taxis emblazoned with huge "Kenwood" stickers across their back windows. I mean, who doesn't love a nice food processor?

(Okay, I know they make stereos too, but it wasn't the first thing that sprang to mind...)

Lepidoptery 5

The next instalment... (see also parts 1, 2, 3 & 4)

These were all taken 3 weeks or so ago in the gardens near our house. It's now cold enough that there are few left, the bigger ones dying off or migrating sooner than the small ones. This little chap is a Common Punch:



















This is a Common Grass Yellow:



















Back to the more outlandish names - this one is called The Pioneer:



















And this rather beautiful (and slightly muddy) fellow is a Blue Pansy - pretty common to see them resting in the grass.

SWH prototype project part 1

Last week my solar water heater project really got moving. Here's a quick photo tour of what we've done so far.

Job no.1 - make the planks.



















Completed outer frame. That's the easy part over with then.



















Then lots of cutting up of bits of copper tube. The white board is used in conjunction with a steel rod and a great big sledgehammer to form fins out of sheet aluminium which will fit around the copper tubes.



















We took all our bits of tube out to a chap in the bazaar who has an oxy-acetylene torch to get it soldered together. As in everything here, health and safety is a bit take-it-or-leave-it: there's a pair of dark glasses the guys sometimes shove on while they're arc-welding, but that's about it. This is our first attempt at leak testing, which wasn't entirely a success (well, the test achieved it's aim fine, but you know what I mean!). Cue a return trip to soldering man.

























I don't know much about soldering copper, but I wouldn't like to hold up our pipework as an example of the greatest quality workmanship! It does look rather beautiful though...



















Here we are starting to lay out and fix the fins over our copper opposite-of-a-radiator arrangement. The fins, having been formed by much bashing, aren't too bad a fit to the tubes, but probably nothing like as close as any of the efforts on the DIY sites I've looked at. We run lines of silicone gel next to the tubes to try and fill up any air gaps (while not a stupendously wonderful heat conductor, it's a darn sight better than an air gap; also, it should be able to cope with high temperatures and differences in thermal expansion of the different metals).

























The aluminium sheet we were able to find in Pindi is 2 or 3 times as thick as what I would have liked - at around 1.2mm or 1/20th of an inch (getting used to everything in imperial is a bit of a challenge too!) - you can bend it in your hands with a bit of effort, but getting it into a shape that'll fit snugly around the tubes was not easy. This added thickness caused all sorts of problems, as compared to the reasonably effortless-looking examples I'd been reading up on:

1. Cutting all that sheet up with only a pair of tin snips is hard work. Really hard work.

2. Shaping the fins took 5 mins or so of bashing about per fin (DIY site example time: 15 seconds).

3. Other people's fins are splendid, shiny, perfectly-formed works of art. Ours look like they've been battered with sledgehammer. Oh, wait...

4. Other people lay out all the fins and gratuitously attack them with a staple gun. Us: staples won't go through, nails won't squeeze them together, split rivets won't reach through, the pop-riveter is broken. So it's out with the drill (of course, plugged into a dodgy extension lead of bits of wire twisted together and shoved in the socket), and lots and lots of nuts and bolts. This has the benefit of pulling the fins into close contact with the tubes, but has the decided disadvantage that we have to lift the whole board up to tighten the nuts up. With a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

A couple of days hard graft, a couple of hundred holes, and a couple of hundred two-man tightening-up-of-nuts-and-bolts later:

























The last batch of little fins drying in the sun (a little coat of paint on the contact surfaces should help prevent galvanic corrosion) - these ones will fit over the thicker manifold pipes at the end. Then, hopefully, it should be all ready for some black spray-paint.

Conference 2

Here's a few pics from our 2nd conference. It was in this lovely hexagonal compound (which made finding your way around it a little taxing until you learned to always keep an eye on which number of side you were on):

(click to see larger image)










There was lots of interesting wildlife that we don't get up by us, some wild, like this pointy fellow:



















But lots kept in the compounds fairly extensive menagerie. These guys' tufts remind my of one of my university professors...



















Poor monkey:

























On the last night we took part in the 'Fun Night' (a title like that is asking for trouble, but it was actually genius!). Lots of people sang songs (including me), danced, read poems, acted out the story of Samson complete with Bollywood dances, and so on...

Here's a couple of the highlights:

Jenny and the other girls put in several hours of practice for this Sindhi Stick Dance:



And this is a Qawali - often written about leaders or holy men, but in this case an irreverent appreciation of our company's leadership team:



We've seen few really good sunsets so far - the sun usually sort of fades out through the haze like this:



















But occasionally it does do something a little bit interesting:

























You may have noticed that this post about a conference - a meeting of people - doesn't contain many people. That's on purpose. But please be assured that we did in fact meet lots of lovely people doing all sorts of interesting work in all kinds of places and situations. We had some interesting teaching, and some fascinating local perspectives on culture and politics. We enjoyed some good times of worship (with an actual music group! And some awesome harmonies, mostly courtesy of one musical family...) and times of sharing things for prayer.

It's nice not to be doing that long bus journey again for a while though...