Yesterday, we took a two hour drive out to the “dark zone,” places with no access to electricity – Escambray and El Sardinal. I have lived out in this area twice in my life – once for about a week – but I am still completely astounded by the landscape. There is an 80-foot waterfall cascading down from a white-rock mesa in the distance.

We showed one of our newly built lamps to an AVODEC community delegate there named Melba Salgado – who I have known for about four years. We talked for a long time about the lamp – she thought that probably all 80 families in her community would want to buy a lamp at a price of $25. This puts us in a tough position, because I have heard the same thing from a number of other community leaders but our organization doesn’t have enough cash to finance a production and service of a large volume of lamps. Please donate to our organization by the way so that we can do this. Long story short, we came up with a plan where we can start financing the lamps for AVODEC delegates in areas without electricity only over the next 6 months. This accounts for about 20 people.

Melba was really adamant about using the lamps for educational purposes (e.g. studying, classes). She thinks that people would use the lamps mostly for this purpose since kerosene and generators are so expensive. I don’t know if she was telling me this because that is what she thought I wanted to hear because they want more lamps available, or if people really are trying to invest their time in education. I think this is difficult to tell, even for people working here in Nicaragua at the ground level.

Regardless, it’s clear there is a big demand for these lamps, especially for a service package including returns or repair in case of failure. I have been taking surveys and asking people if they would prefer a better, brighter and longer lasting lamp for $25 with no service package, or the same with a service package and the response has been 100% in favor of the service package so far.