Day 8: First Inoculation

Elections in Sierra Leone are approaching and Makeni is home to the largest oppositional population. Because of this, demonstrations were planned to take place in the market today and we were advised not to travel near the clock tower. We began the morning discussing some larger questions that we can ask Khanjan later today to get a better sense of our steady state operations and future of the project. Soon we were able to take a trip to the site. No demonstrations were heard about but practically every shop/vendor was on strike meaning we had a very hard time finding materials needed for our production runs. We were able to pick up Jawara, source some plastic bags from a vendor closer to our site, and then drove to the GRO house. We first discussed how to bug proof the house and determined nailing more wire mesh to the outside of the house where there are large gaps between the roof and walls. We will also buy bug repellant that Jawara can spray around the inside of the house each night. We then drained the banana leaves that had been pasteurizing and determined the max wet weight of substrate our bags could hold. From this, we calculated how much grain spawn to add to the bag and showed Jawara our layering method for inoculating substrate. We were able to create two grow bags from our banana leaves and hang them in the house. Jawara’s neighbors were very interested in our process and took pictures and videos of us as well as helped us with the process. We were concerned with our new rice spawn still being wet so we hung it with cuts just like our grow bags. Jawara seemed very comfortable with the process and we now had our first inoculated grow bags that will fruit within the next month. We traveled back to the resort and took a break before returning to project discussions. We met with Naakesh and went through an activity where we listed all of the avenues of our project that require the transition of resources or cash, and what problems can occur within those avenues that can cause our project to fail. We then categorized these failures and will work on tying metrics to each to ensure that we can prevent them from happening. We spoke with Khanjan over dinner for some larger business model questions and came back to the resort to plan the following day.

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