While I was in Gulu in my second week, Daniel and I set up the stationary bike for the visually impaired students to use for exercise.

I get the feeling that Daniel didn’t just want the bike for the students – I think he’s going to be in the best shape of them all. After setting up the bike and hanging out with the students for a few days, I headed back to Kampala to work on the generator part of the project with Victor.

He had been hard at work (seriously, in the evenings and his off-hours) designing and constructing the circuits to convert the electricity from the bike to charge the batteries and ultimately a cell phone.

We had two separate circuits to make and he didn’t have time to do it all on his own so he gave me a diagram, taught me how to construct a circuit on a bread board, and told me to get to it.  (Incidentally, Victor is also a great teacher.)

Once we had a working circuit on the bread board, he taught me to solder and again trusted me to work on it and not blow anything up.

In the end, we both had working circuits. Can you guess which one is mine?

Hint: I had to go back and ask him multiple times for more wire. So maybe it wasn’t the most efficiently designed.

But we got all the parts attached…

And it worked! Victor attached these red and green lights to indicate when the battery is full and ready to charge a phone.

It also worked to charge the phone directly. So that was awesome! Victor had a few more tweaks but I needed to head back to Gulu, so he agreed to transport it the next time he traveled to the North.