My first draft of this post was, in no uncertain terms, a work of genius. It was informative, revealing, entertaining, moving, shocking and uplifting. It had characters, subplots, themes…

…and crucially it contained every metaphor, synonym, expression and simile for excrement I could think of, expertly woven in seamless fashion into the narrative to be almost imperceptible to those not in on the joke. Honestly, I even managed to crowbar “touching cloth” and “turtle’s head” in there without being too obvious!

Sure, the topic of our Biogas Collector does lend itself to a certain amount of, well… toilet humour; however, as you will have read in our previous post on the project we are talking about a pretty amazing and potentially life changing piece of design coupled with mother nature at her most resourceful, so it seemed petty of me to bring it down to the basic component… poop. There seems to have been enough of that going round here recently as it is.

With the project nearing completion thanks to the amazing work of our Gap teams this year, I recently took the opportunity to visit Camp Tinangol with our BGC’s designer and friend to Camp Borneo, Ian Hall, to see the last checks and pipes put in place before our very first deposit… which we even captured on film!

Luckily for you, the biogas collector isn’t a one dimensional poo based methane gas creator so the resulting film wasn’t quite as disturbing as you might think.

The BGC can quite happily use other natural waste, like food leftovers, kitchen scraps and even some garden trimmings, to produce its highly practical methane gas which in our case will, once we have given the waste products enough time to start the process, be used for cooking.

However with the possibility for the gas to also be used for lighting and heating we could be looking at a design that could be rolled out to communities across our camp locations in Africa, South East Asia and beyond to make a world of difference to those willing to use it. Yes, we are aware there may be some initial reluctance to overcome – - “You’re cooking with gas from what?!?” – - and we of course still have to make sure the beasty actually works (fingers crossed!) but come on, how amazing would it be for poor remote communities to be able to have access to free fuel for cooking, lighting and heating? This, as well as saving money, would also decrease the need to harvest wood sources and so help protect local eco-systems. Everyone’s a winner! Isn’t nature great?

By chance, on the day the plumbing for the BGC was completed Camp Tinangol was host to a party for the local community attended by Dr Maximus Ongkili, the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation in the Malaysian government. It was a celebration for the completion of a new road which provided much needed access for local communities, but we of course took the opportunity to re-introduce ourselves to the good doctor and explain what we had been up to with our Gappers in the community. However, our chance for Dr Maximus to be the first to provide the… err…  “Official results for the Dunny-on-the-Wold bye-election”, were scuppered when he decided to talk politics to the gathered throng rather than poo. (Pauses for cynical cry of “what’s the difference!”)

But, whilst we missed the opportunity of seeing a government minister leaving a toilet cubicle with a bashful smile whilst sporting an orange Camp Borneo T-Shirt and saying “I now declare this bio-gas collector open!”, Doctor Maximus was kind enough to publicly acknowledge the good work the clients and staff of Camp Borneo are doing in and around Tinangol (It’s not all about poo). And a few minutes later the karaoke started… sadly, that can never be avoided. And Ian and I did sing a song… but only after I requested that Doctor Maximus should dance whilst we sing…

…he did.

If you want to see further pics of the BGC and the resulting party, click here.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 8:07 am and is filed under Borneo, Gap, Project Diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.