Belize Trip: Day 6

1/7

Well, there may not be a whole awful lot to talk about today.  Mike, Luke and I stayed at the hotel today in order to do a different kind of work.  The rest of the crew went back to the village to set up stoves.  We remained behind to make some repairs/modifications/upgrades to some flashlight / flood light type units.  They originally come with some batteries that do not hold a charge very well, in fact, Dr. Skon said they will drain themselves in 30 days if not used, and if they are not recharged before that, they become useless.  So a few days ago, in Belize, Mike took some old laptop batteries apart and pulled out the Lithium Ion battery cells out (l laptop battery is basically a group of usually 6 or 8 Lithium Ion batteries chained together to provide power storage) in order to bring down.  First we had to remove the screws holding the unit together.  After that, Luke or I would remove the old battery pack and snip the power connector cable off and hand it to Mike.  Then we would take a pair of pliers and yank some plastic out near where the battery used to be to make room for the new battery.  While we did that, Mike would take the LI Ion cells and solder the power cable wires to the battery so that the new battery could be used.  We then tested the battery to make sure it worked, put it in pace and closed up the unit and started the next one. 

This sounds very simple and straight forward, but the plastic is difficult to remove, and I know that I personally will have blisters in the morning from how hard I hard to pull and twist to remove it.  In addition, the soldering irons we had were fairly cheaply made and so did not work too well in the humid air down here.  Mike had a very difficult time soldering until he learned how to use the iron’s quirks to his advantage.  Beyond that even, because these cells came from batteries that were considered dead, some of the cells were no good.  So I had to go through each and every cell pack (they came in pairs) and break them apart into single cells.  Once I did that, I had to take readings off the battery and determine if it was a either A- a good cell ready to go, B- a good cell that needed charging, or C- a bad cell.  In order to do this, Mike needed to explain what the Voltage and Amperage readings meant, this was not something that I was super experienced in.  I now have a rough idea of what the differences are, but I cannot explain it too awful well.

But the day had a few hitches to go with it.  To start off, neither Jason’s nor my alarms went off this morning, so we were lucky that there is still all the fireworks and music going on in the early morning down here, else we would have missed breakfast.  We managed to get up, get dressed and get downstairs in about 7 minutes.   We weren’t even the last people to get there, so that was surprising.  Once the other group had left, Mike and I walked down the road to go to a hardware shop to get a better screwdriver that was the correct size for what we needed.  We walked past the store the first time.  We were a bit confused when we could not find it, but on the way back, there were opening the store, as we walked by, so it was pretty easy to find that time.  Once we returned, we knocked out the 13 lights we had to do pretty fast, with 3 of us we managed a nice quick flow.  We were told that one of the local’s wife would be bringing us more lights, so we sat around a bit and waited.  Then we waited some more.  We waiting until about 1 o’clock and then called Dr. Skon because we had not seen the wife yet with the lights.  Eventually we figure out that she had left the lights at the front desk for us, but no one told us that she stopped by, so we have no idea how long we wasted by waiting for her.  But those other lights flew by too.  Then Luke was getting tired, so he headed back upstairs.  Afterwards, Mike and I decided to check and prep the rest of the batteries.  We had a pretty good bonding time while doing that too, it was pretty nice.  When the rest of the crew got back to the hotel, they brought us more lights as well.  Mike and I jumped at the chance to keep working, and likely would have blown through the other 24 had Dr. SKon not told us to stop for the night.

All in all it was a pretty decent day.  I am beginning to feel a bit more homesick… actually a lot home sick, it’s only 122 days until I come home.  But who’s counting?  Don’t get me wrong, I am glad I am on this trip, but it’s a long ways from home in a country where I do not even know how to speak to most of the locals… it adds a whole new level to the feeling of foreignness.