Yenso Solar - No longer homeless!

After 7 days of desperate searching, we finally found a place to live! Phew. It’s a hotel, but the owner is super nice and is dropping the rate a TON to make it affordable for us for a month. She’s going to let us use their kitchen and other amenities. And moms, don’t worry it’s next door to a police station. Sleep soundly. We will!

            We were also able to spread the word about lamps and get our advertising stuff set up today. Tomorrow we will hit the market circle! Jude was working hard, talking to every taxi man, every restaurant owner, everyone we saw. The lamps are popular!

    In the following days, the adventures continued. We both enjoyed some antelope and fufu. Cole bit the bullet. Literally, there was a bullet in his rice. We withdrew the rest of our money from the Indiegogo fundraising campaign (shoutout to all our donors!!) and sweated bullets while carrying huge wads of cash through the Ghanian streets.

            We are using mobile money, a super cool innovation here. It’s a bank-less financing method that involves sending and receiving money via phone accounts. It allows people to send money straight to our account, reducing fraud and risk. But when we set up the account, the girl tried to cheat us! The manager helped us out and we got our money back, but it is sad to see the amount of corruption in the world. We make it a huge point to stress honesty and integrity in all of our Yenso Solar trainings for the employees that we hire. 

            Ghana suffers from widespread power outages called “Dumsor.” In Twi, Dumsor means off and on. (And, 'Yenso' means light it up). Dumsor was really bad last year, but people sometimes tell us that “Dumsor has left! We don’t need solar light!” Well….dumsor struck again the other day. Even though it was getting late, we hit the streets! It was incredible. People were using small candles or cheap Chinese flashlights to light their shops. We even found some kerosene lanterns! When we showed people how bright out lights were, some jumped in surprise. It was night and day.

            There is a nice elderly couple that runs a small shop selling foodstuffs next to where we live. We stopped by during dumsor to buy some stuff and thought the shop was closed. Then we noticed the dim light of a flickering candle. We heard a few people buying more candles from them. Sun King Pro 2 in hand, we lit up shop with 160 lumens of solar powered greatness. It was really touching to see the difference it made. Suddenly we could see the faces of our elderly friends, and they could see their customers. We saw first hand the difference these lamps could make in people’s lives. Light is truly empowering. Ahhh this is great! 

            People keep thinking that we are missionaries. Two white guys walking around with backpacks….it’s too much for people. “Hey Elders!” “It’s the LDS!” When we went to church, everyone kept asking which mission area we were from. We had to change clothes later on Sunday because we didn’t want to look like missionaries not following mission rules.

Jude posting the Yenso Solar advertisement

            We have started gathering a sales team and are making more sales! Our guys are working hard and have tons of great ideas. Yesterday, we ran into a guy named Tony on the street who seemed interested in talking with us. We set up an appointment and met with him later in the afternoon and discovered that he is a university graduate who has set up an NGO. His NGO works with local leaders to gather funds to set up schools in rural villages. They help village elders purchase generators and lights so children can have night school. All of it is pretty expensive. Our solar systems would cut costs a significant amount, be less noisy, and are safer for the children. It could be a good way to get Sun King lamps to the villages! It has really made us think about how better to have more of a humanitarian reach in Ghana. We are social innovators. We just have to innovate.

            Lamps are selling, sales reps are excited, and thanks to some sketchy medicine…...Cole’s travel sickness is going away!