Monday late in the evening we were still busy with making plug adapters for the big day on Tuesday. Because we were very excited, we continued working during the late hours.

After a few hours of sleep and a short preparation time in the office during the morning hours we started our first trip to Mamelodi. Because we haven’t had an idea of what we really could expect it was a new experience for all of us. At first we went with the whole team to one of the houses. After introduction leaded by the Nova people we took a look around this household.

Then we split up in two teams: "Di Tau" and "Kameelpaard" (in English: The Lions And The Giraffe) and visited different households.

In Mamelodi not every household is very poor or live in shacks (a Shack is a small wooden house with for example sheep metal on top). During this day we established installing different types of measure equipment. And making inventories of all the electrical equipment in the houses.

For this day we have chosen the middleclass lower income to become our test clients.

During this day we have spoken with the house owners, inquiring about their electrical behaviours and got a lot of information. During the chat there were also questions about how many people there live, if there is always someone at home during the day, etc.
All this technical and social information was used for our inventory report.

We didn’t assume that the families in this neighbourhood would have these types of stone houses and use that many electronical devices. The houses have living spaces between 60 till 120 square metres. All the house owners were very nice and open minded to answer any questions. They were also very curious of the things we were doing in there houses. We had a lot of questions that we were glad to answer. Because we understand that strange people coming in to your own house brings up some doubts or questions.

Everyone in the group had mixed feeling to work in a township like Mamelodi. Because we have never seen such poor people living and were affraid what we would see. In the end we could conclude that the people living in Mamelodi West are very kind and open for help from the outside.

We were glad to inform you about our experiences in the township Mamelodi.

Andreas Reibe, team Kameelpaard (Imtech HAI team, Team Kameelpaard)
Daniel Prior, team Di Tau (Student from Windesheim College Zwolle, Netherlands. Doing his thesis for Nova Institute)