While I was at Canyon Ranch the villagers finished the first compost toilet and boy they did a great job. I have attached pictures of the toilet and the plans. In the plans you will see there is an optional solar panel to power the exhaust fan. The villagers went with this option the solar panel upped the cost of the toilets by $150.00 which is a fortune in Botswana. Without the solar panel we would not have had any power (electricity) for the exhaust fan as we have not started working on our energy plan yet.
The village elders choose to take the profits from the pineapple sales and buy the solar panel. We now have an issue as $150.00 was all the money we had in the treasury. We still need to pay the two employees of our new public works department to empty the compost toilet and we still have 4 more toilets to build.
I gave the elders a class on economics and we are going to adopt a pay as you go policy for all current and future government expenditures. Also we are going to build up our treasury to have at least a 2 year surplus.
In the mean time to help us through this short term crisis and to help us with our up coming energy projects, I will have the details out shortly we are starting a village foundation that anybody can donate to.
If you would like to make a donation, simple click on the donate button below, we accept all major credit cards, we are looking to raise 7,000 Pula’s which is equivalent to 1,000 US dollars and should give us a 2 year surplus of funds. Any donation would be appreciates just pennies would help out our village. Unfortunately the donations will only be tax deductible if you live in Botswana.
Please Donate to Dug's Village
The villagers all love the new compost toilet I believe once we have the first 5 built we will see a nice reduction in sewage and also no longer a need to buy elephant dung. Though buying the solar panel has put a financial burden on the village, hindsight tells me it was the right thing to do as it make the compost toilet much more functional and keeps with our goal of energy independent and a zero carbon foot print. We will also be better educated to put together our energy plan as we will now have some experience with Solar Power.
Not much poker for me this week, my nephew “Z” who you may remember from the Puerto Rico trip had an awesome evening playing poker. He played about 6 hours and won over $1,200.00 that is over $200.00 an hour or $400,000.00 a year. Below is one of his first hands and shows how the poker gods helped him out at first, but after that hand it was all skill. Great job “Z”
Cheers,
DUG
P.S. The results are in and it looks like DUG is headed to Greenland.
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