 I want to tell you, this is an academic presentation. I want to just give you a few terms that we use, so we can point positive and practice these tests. Appropriate technology, really what study of minds in the 70s, like you have Schumacher. Generally, like my paraphrasing of what people call appropriate technology, is any technology that meets our current needs by leveraging all the available resources, while bolstering the NAP, like local capacity, local know-how, at the same time protecting the future. It's got a few other things that you should consider. Can it be maintained and adopted locally with the money and know-how that's there? What are the political, cultural, economic, environmental impacts? Innovation often doesn't consider what's going to happen after the innovation. Appropriate technology does. But for me, the extra part is that it really needs to be designed with or by the people who are going to use the technology. So really important concept, especially in international work, because kind of endemic to international work is that you are not an expert on that local economy, because you're not from that little group. I shouldn't say local economy, I should say local community. You're not an expert on it, but you really need to be designing with. To do that, I often hold series of needs and resources meetings. We just get a bunch of people together. We ask, hey, what are the top needs? We prioritize those together, different ways. Sometimes we have check marks. Sometimes we have one person leave the room, and then we'll point at different needs, and everyone will cheer. And then we'll ask the person outside, which cheering was the loudest. I think that method might be called the Spartan method, but I don't know why. But it's academic setting, so I should tell you that it has a name. I think it's Spartan. We do the same thing with resources. What do we have? We get really creative, like trash, musicians, sores. In Las Movinas, too, in Dominican Republic, this is an ad hoc community built on the side of the river next to industry. So industry is often on the side of the river. Workers come to that industry, and then they set up homes to spend the night with a little group. And then eventually, they start moving out their families, so they don't have to be going back for the one day that they have up in. And then that community grows. This is how Las Movinas came to be. There, their top needs were more school, space, jobs, water, energy, top resources, bamboo, trash, you know how in government. And, God, they now have so many kids that they don't have enough school space. So these kids work together with this trash and our students and local students to design this school room from plastic bottles. So school rooms built from plastic bottles, and then everything's a waste material. This is a finish made from sawdust from a local coffin manufacturer. These are broken tiles. That's wood from the local industry that they used for shipping. This Plexiglas was even waste Plexiglas that we have in there so people can see what the school room was built by, built with. Now there's 48 students that can go to school in this community that weren't able to go before. Now these students have been doing this for so long, they're on our newer projects. In this same community, we decided to address energy issues the next year. We're like, OK, how are we going to do this? Like, what's the best way to address energy issues? Like, should we just build a solar array? That is a solution. But we talked with the community, and we came up with a plan that I absolutely love. It's probably my favorite plan in the whole rest of the presentation I'm going to give today. This was my favorite plan. And now I'm going to take a step back and tell you about some of my less favorite plans. With this one, what we decided to do was to open up a series of solar workshops to local electricians. So people who consider themselves electricians to self-identify. They work as electricians. No one there has any certifications. That's not what the community has. But anyone who self-identifies as electrician, you're going to teach solar workshops to. So this is us taking broken stuff, just broken little solar things, and teaching the local electricians about the parts. This is Junior. His dad is his house rat right now. And he is definitely a local electrician. In this photo, he's 15. And in this photo, he's just made it light up. And something happens to people when they're like, wait, the sun is doing this. And so the cool thing is that they already knew about electricity. So all we had to do was add the new solar parts. So then what the community did is they decided to build an off-grid public pharmacy. So they designed an entire system and built it. And I like this photo. There's another photo I was trying to find for you. But I ran out of time. But it's even near further back. And I can judge how successful I was by how far back in the photo I end up. So this is Junior's dad teaching other people about solar power. There is a photo where the room is packed. And there's like, I can only tell I have a red hat. And you can see like this much of me. I'm going to find it someday. But that to me is success. We taught small-scale solar. The community took it over, did large-scale solar. And then they taught the whole, this is the inside of it. The contrast isn't that great. But there's the parts all really well-labeled. And then this is the community meeting where they're teaching all of the community. So we taught electricians. Electricians taught other community members. And then together they taught everyone. This was like eight years ago. And I just realized, I'm really glad you can't tell. So I don't know why I'm calling myself up. But I'm literally wearing the exact same outfit. That is, I can't. That's really funny. Go, go me. So one thing that helped me last while Venus is that we had worked in another community called La Yucca. La Yucca is an urban body. It's the only body left in the center of Santo Domingo that's super poor. They've been trying to get it out. And they will not leave. They're held in there. That community, the streets are about five and a half feet wide, right? So you're walking like this. You're carrying solar supplies. A moped is coming towards you. You've got to do some non-verbal communication and try to figure out how you're going to get by each other. The first day I show up there, I have, the first day I show up there was students. I have 12 US students. I have 12 Dominican students from the local university. We get there. And they're putting on a fireworks show for us. And I was especially like, they're putting on fireworks for us. No, that isn't appropriate. The town, they appropriate all their own electricity. So 11% of the electricity in Santo Domingo is reappropriated. It's not paid for. And it's done just by local self-identified electricians. And so the wires get pretty crazy, because they're just finding whatever wire they can. Sometimes telephone wires are being used to carry currents. And it happened to be on fire when we got there. It was one of the sweetest things ever since fireworks. So we're designing a portable take system. This is community meetings. Here's their playgrounds, is where everyone hangs out. They have a school here. The second story of the school is for adult literacy classes and religious classes and inquire. And the power goes out all the time. And you can't see anything. It's just completely dark in there. And it's also really sweaty. So we were setting out to develop a power system for all the powers of the second floor for all their evening classes. We designed the system. And we had learned that we needed to hide the solar panels so that they don't get stolen. So we designed it all together. And then we're having a community meeting. And they're like, no, no, no, they can get stolen. We're like, yeah, but we hid it really low. They're like, yeah, but that means if somebody finds it, they can get it and no one will see that. They're like, this is what you should do. And it was brilliant. It blew my mind. They're like, make it as public as possible. Put it right out there. Right here where everyone in the play can see it. Because the one thing trying to steal it, everyone else will be able to call out. The thing that you only get when you're doing community design, you might have learned before that theft is an issue. You need to hide, so you need to hide things. But you would have been wrong in that situation. I was wrong in that situation. So I want to go way back. My first job in solar. I had done solar for years. And I thought I would end up in prison for it. Because I was doing it for homeless squats. We were doing it completely off-grid and legally in the US, often in cities. And I got a job for the Shots Energy Center. I was a student, my first internship. I'm like, I get to design solar. I'm not going to go jail. And I'm going to get paid for it. This is amazing. So we dialed the system. We're at Espelagoon. The Rangers are using 16 kilowatt diesel generators. Oil everywhere. This is a no-brainer. We're going to crush this project. Keep in mind, this is like, I don't know, 20 years ago. I'm just going to round. I might be rounding down. This is like 20 years ago. And so solar was really expensive. But we're still going to dial it. We dialed it so well that I now have time to do their bathroom. They have a public bathroom. And I'm like, great, let's go solar on this. And I designed it. I got the right solar panels. I have the first LEDs that are out and ready to be used. And I have all the parts labeled, kind of like you saw in the Dominican Republic project. So that visitors could come learn about solar power. Keeping in mind that this is before people really paid attention to solar, right? And I finished the presentation. There's this guy watching me the whole time. Mustache, I'm used to these guys. He's got his feet up the whole time, right? Let arms cross. This is a presentation. He's just, and I can see the hate. I can see the disgruntlement in his eyes. And I was like, all right, any questions? And I nailed this thing. I did like all the math and the photos and everything. That was my CAD drawing, right? And he's like, it's not gonna work. And I was just learning to be academic, right? So the street part of me wanted to respond very differently, right? But instead I said, do you care to elaborate? I have a feeling it sounded more like you care to elaborate, but I was trying, right? And he's like, yeah, built for a rock set. And I realized that he was totally right. I forgot what environment I was building for. This is for rural Humboldt County, right? A solar panel is a target, especially then. A solar panel is also an attack on some type of thing. I don't know what it was, but I know that I often got called a hippie, which I totally understood. A dreamer, which I'm not arguing, but a communist. And I never understood why solar power made me a communist. I'm like, I don't know if I get that. But he was right about the context. He was high up in the state park department and he saw what people did to science, and shotguns and stuff. So we redesigned the systems and no one could tell it was solar. Chiapas, my first time, we're now two years after the Schatz Energy Center. My first opportunity to work in Chiapas remotely, I really wanted to work in Chiapas. This was at the height of the Zapatista movement. If you haven't studied the Zapatista movement, it is incredible. And one of the most powerful examples of completely disempowered groups using the internet to make change. This is Akhliyad. In 1997, which was close to the year I was doing this project, they had a massacre where people came in to a church and killed like 90 something women and children. I'm not an expert on that history, but I suggest looking it up off the album without the peace movement. And so I got this opportunity to design a system for mobile network workers. They would go to the city, the city or the big town and work with local doctors and then they go out to these rural villages. It's like three hour drive and then like a two hour walk, right? And then they would, as nurses, they would go take measurements. They'd bring it back to the doctor, get diagnosis and then go back out, which we now call telemedicine. And so my job is to design a solar powered system that would enable them to stay out and feel longer. Now I put everything into this thing. It's my first year teaching at HSU, so I guess that's 16 years ago. We made a pelican box. It could be dropped from 10 feet. It was solar powered. It had enough, it would run the whole system just from the sun and also store another few hours. It could be run from the US type wall socket. It could also be run from any other type of wall socket, 120 volt, 240 volt. Also, in case you needed it, it could be run from your car charger. So it could run your telecommunications devices and if your car battery died, you could use it to trickle charge your car battery back up. And I did it all totally robust so nothing would break. And there was just a few little switches you put in a different order and it would run in any of those things. And everything fitting beautifully. Nowadays, if you're a lot easier to admit, in fact, your cell phone does most of those things. But back then that wasn't an option. So I just dialed it. And the nonprofit I was working for, they loved it. They thought it was great US based nonprofit. They were doing all the communication with the nurses. They paid us for it. They took photos, thumbs up. And it was a total failure. Abject failure. I don't have time to do the community based version of you answering it, but so much about why you needed the failure. You knew how to use it? No one knew how to use it. This whole multiple switch thing. Come on, I loved it. I'm a geek. I'm like, three switches do eight different things because it's like binary combinations up, up, down versus up, down, up. No, you don't want that. You don't want that. Well, it was expensive. That was not part of my criteria because there was a nonprofit that was paying for these things, but it was too expensive. Somebody else, another person. Well, I said, well, I'm a big fan of this. I can keep it up. No, no, it didn't. You know what they needed? A laptop with a big battery. That's a solar panel, a big battery laptop. Done, right? That was the needs. Why didn't I know that? I could blame all types of things. Skype, you'd just come out and no one knew how to use it. I couldn't get them to run out there. They didn't have a telephone most of the time. I was communicating by third party. I could blame everything, but really what it was is I got way too excited for my own design. If you're not uncomfortable during the design process, if you're not questioning whether this is the right solution, it is not the right solution. Get out of the garden. I'm coming back to the Dominican Republic now. We're working for this local animal shelter that's right in the middle of the city. I'm about to tell you the saddest story you've heard. Right in the middle of the city, they have an animal shelter. At the time, they had, I think, about 90 dogs, and they had some cats. I didn't count on any cats. Cats are hard to count. They resisted. And so we dialed the system for them. And then working together. And then the director only met with us a few times. And then we built it out of clay just to really get the feel of it. And right in the center of the animal shelter, we had this big solar array with everything really visible, but also barbed wire just in case. And right in the center, so from the outside, you could look in and tell that this animal shelter was powered by solar. And we showed them that I can't do that, so you can get stolen. And one of my many, very naive moments, I'm like, you got 40 pit bulls. And then these other dogs, no one's going to break in to steal it. It's like they'll just poison them. Yeah, I want to pre-warrant you. But I was devastated and also remembered that I do not know things. But that was absolutely what's going to happen. He already had the dogs being poisoned because they were barking too much. So if we put in $1,000 worth of equipment, it was going to be gone. So we redesigned the system to look like this. It just looks like a tower of IBC totes, those 1 meter cube tanks. And then the parts are all inside. So it just looks like a weird tower of waste materials. I'm going to now make this story happier. You ready? What they always wanted to do was move to the country where they wouldn't have to have the dogs poisoned. So this is where they moved to $140, 20 cats. Love more photos. This dog is like my mascot there, so I don't know what to do. The problem with the new place they moved is that they only have three hours of power a week. Oh, sorry, a day. But they don't know which three hours. It's really hard to run an animal shelter when you don't know when you're going to have powers going three hours. So we designed the system together, going back to the city, back out there. It's a couple hours away. And we get out there with all the parts we're ready to build. And we've learned all the lessons. We're going to have the system totally hidden. We get out there and they're like, sorry, the power's been out for a whole week. None of our, all our tools are dead, all our power tools are dead. And we're like, this is my favorite solar baller moment right here. We're like, no problem. We'll just build it on the ground first. And we'll then use that to build the system. So we built it on the ground, which meant I got a photo of all the parts. And then we used that to run all the drills, put the system together, which is hidden on the roof like this, and it's running the power for it. I'm going to get through some more. No question. I'm going to get through some more. Practice is India. 2018, we bring eight students from the US, eight students from New Delhi, out to a rural community, two rural communities in New Dark Red Ash. I have all types of great stories about that place. I'm just going to tell you one and a half solar stories. This is us doing that same thing where we teach small solar workshops, real small scale. Super fun. This is us building a system that powers an entire house and sells energy to the neighbors. Oh, wow. You know how I feel bad for telling you because I did not talk earlier, Mom? That was perfect. I should have turned the lights off earlier. So this system, power in the house, selling power to the neighbor, fantastic system. Can anyone tell me what is weird, what's different about the system that you probably have never seen before unless you've been in my class before? Yeah, this thing, it kind of, you're really close. You're so close. Yes, it was because monkeys throw rocks at the solar panels and break the solar panels. So I was all right, let's do this. We're going to build this and put the screen on it. So we put the system to get the system going. We get it running together and mentor on this. This is probably the photo of the moment where we had a conversation like this. I'm telling all the visitors what's going on and telling them about this monkey thing. I've learned to listen. I'm not going to question. I've worked with monkeys in other places never seen through rocks and solar panels, but maybe Northern Indian monkeys have a special like anger towards solar panels. Monkeys hold grudges. I know that, right? Like I've seen that. So I was like, all right, a solar panel across the monkey and now we're done, you know? R.K. calls me obviously Lonnie, which means he's trying to address me with respect. He's like, do you think monkeys throw rocks at the solar panels? Humans throw rocks at the monkeys and they hit my solar panel. I was like, oh, I got to try to work my way back through through all the people I have ever told that monkeys throw rocks at solar panels. And then try not to let the monkeys know that I had that now. This is us building a small scale system in Empires, Mexico. Aliyah just, last system was to try to power all of Hawaii. Like, so, you know, this is like early starts and then just kept growing and growing. That is the end of my solar talk. What do you got? Three minutes of questions. I love that question. Thank you. We might not have any more time for questions after I answer this one. So you know, if you have, you might want to just let it go now because that's a deep question. First of all, I'd like to point out that I work internationally because I want to learn how to dance other dances, eat other foods, speak other languages. It is only for me. If I just cared about my impact, I would stay in my own communities. So I can have the most impact in my own communities. But also, I wouldn't want to work internationally without having a positive impact. So the way I do it, which might be hard because we just met and you might already know this about me, but like sometimes it's hard for me to shut up. But internationally, it is not. It's really easy for me to remember these things I should remember here, which is just like stop talking and listen more. What I found is that, you know, my goal in traveling is to never be a tourist. And to work my way eventually to being a member of a community, that takes years. But there's this really cool middle ground where you're a guest, where you can really have a lot of impact together. The way that I do that is usually if I'm going to a new community, I work with a local community group who's going to carry the torch on forever. Because remember, like, you're not gonna be there to hold the torch. So the idea can't be yours. The knowledge of how to hold the torch can't be yours, the torch is an analogy. Because you're gonna leave. And so if you want to have impact, that torch has to be carried in. So I work with local community groups. They help build the trust. They help teach me how not to be too foolish, but a little bit of foolish is okay. Well, like if you can learn to laugh yourself and realize that we're all just iterative prototypes, you know, trying to figure out how to do better, then it really seems to work. I've also found that if you just, if you approach things with like an authentic, true desire to learn together, and remember that you do not have a solution to bring. Like, you don't come from a country that has all the answers. Like if you come with that knowledge, the connections just seem to happen. And then once you start building together, there's nothing like it. You can't, there's no other travel like it. When you build something together and you sweat it together, you've seen each other really ugly. You've smelled each other even uglier. But like, you get to know people at a really real level. And thank you for that question. Thank you all so much for your time. I'm gonna clap for you and then I'm gonna figure out who won this book. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.