Cape Town: Planting Days & Wrapping Up

As it is my final week in Cape Town, my time with Heart Capital is coming to a close this Friday...but first an update of the last few weeks.

Cape Town at Night From Lion's Head Full Moon Hike

We finally had the planting day for one of the Techno Park companies as well as some other planting purchases that were made. This was combined with a day where about 20-30 University of Stellenbosch students came to help build, plant, and dig at our Kayamandi site.

Volunteers, Interns, and the Sandbag Boys in Kayamandi

Techno Park Company, CompuScan, Planting Spekboom in Kayamandi

CompuScan and Me Planting

 We ended up planting about 30 Spekboom trees to create a sort of garden perimeter in the middle of the sites. In the middle is a huge tree that was left in the middle and will look really great when it is summer here and the plants start blooming.

There has also been an increase in sales from the Techno Park promotional campaign which is great. We've sold about 75 trees at this point and its fantastic to see this business come into a revenue earning state.

Last week was focused on building and creation of the other space we have in the Kayamandi area known as the corridor. This consisted of one day of me and another girl cleaning out a building and then one day painting the space with the help of other inters - still a lot of work left but a really good start!

Before

Before

After

After

 Another highlight of the last few weeks was getting to spend some time working with a great businessman in Kayamandi, Songo. I had met him once before last year during my trip to Stellenbosch where he graciouslly gave a presentation about his work to our group. He created a BMX park / running area for the kids of the township. There they have a facility to do their homework then the chance to ride the bikes, learn tricks, participate in competitions, and even competitions in other cities and countries. Our Food Pods site is directly above (on a hill) the BMX park and we were building an access road between his park and our site.

http://www.songo.info/

Songo and I

Kids Riding at the BMX Park

As a second highlight from Friday - a team of interns and I got the chance to see a traditional Xhosa show with singing, dancing, and dinner called Amazink in Kayamandi later that night. It was an amazing show and to top it off one of our Food Pods growers is the manager and another the chef for the show. :)

Amazink Show in Kayamandi

The next week will be focused on collecting some of the plants and the payments from the Techno Park companies. I will also be mentoring the two new interns who will be taking over Wonder Plant once I leave so it will be a lot of transitioning, moving around final documents, and wrapping up the work that I have done here.

Ahmedabad, India: Week Four

This past week was filled with a lot of work and a lot of fun. At the beginning of the week our team had two possible approaches to the project, but by the time Wednesday came around we had consulted with multiple faculty members and decided to pursue a path that involved heavy programming. Once this decision was made it was time to just sit down and crank away at a computer. This is the time when I was thankful for the people on stackoverflow.com who had experienced all of the debugging issues that I faced and posted fixes for them.

This week Professor Rakesh Pandey was also visiting Ahmedabad University. He is the link between Ahmedabad University, Olin College and the ADE (affordable design and entrepreneurship) program. It was good to give him an update on the work that I have been conducting here at the Institute of Life Sciences and get his input in regards to how to approach challenges that we were facing. Thanks to him, I also got the opportunity to meet with previous ADE students from Ahmedabad University and get insights into their experiences. It was great seeing the different viewpoints and hearing about their experiences. These discussions also opened my eyes in regards to the Indian education system and how different the mentality is here compared to the US. Professor Pandey also spoke to students at a variety of the Institutes under the Ahmedabad University umbrella. The talk was focused around his life experiences, innovation, and ADE. One of the most inspiring thing that he said was that there is one thing that is common between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, and that is 24 hours in a day. This really emphasized the importance of time management and the fact that some people can complete 2 years worth of work in one year, while others can spend 40 years doing just one year of work.

This past week we also explored one of the larger developmental projects in the Ahmedabad area, the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project. The Sabarmati River, which divides the city of Ahmedabad in half, is now being developed into a 10 km walk way, which at completion of the project will also house gardens, amusement parks, golf courses, and even water parks.

The Sabarmati River Front

Enjoying the rains with my good friend Tilak. 

Visiting a local art gallery located near ILS. 

500 year old architecture at the Adalaj stepwell.