<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/africas-cold-rush-and-the-promise-of-refrigeration>
"At one in the morning, several hours before fishing boats launch, François
Habiyambere, a wholesale fish dealer in Rubavu, in northwest Rwanda, sets out
to harvest ice. In the whole country, there is just one machine that makes the
kind of light, snowy flakes of ice needed to cool the tilapia that, at this
hour, are still swimming through the dreams of the fish farmers who supply
Habiyambere’s business. Flake ice, with its soft edges and fluffy texture,
swaddles seafood like a blanket, hugging, without crushing, its delicate flesh.
The flake-ice machine was bought secondhand a few years ago from a Nile-perch
processing plant in Uganda. A towering, rusted contraption, it sits behind a
gas station on the main road into the southeastern market town of Rusizi, on
the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its daily output would
almost fill a typical restaurant dumpster, which is considerably less than the
amount required by the five fishmongers who use it.
“The first one who comes gets enough,” Habiyambere told me when I accompanied
him one day in May. “The rest do not.” He said this in a tone of quiet
resignation. The machine is five and a half hours’ drive south of where he
lives, which is why his workday begins in the middle of the night. He rides in
one of the country’s few refrigerated trucks, driven by a solid, handsome
twenty-eight-year-old named Jean de Dieu Umugenga, and laden with spring onions
and carrots bound for market. The route is twisty and Umugenga swings around
the hairpin bends with panache, shifting in his seat with each gear change,
while twangy
inanga music plays on the radio.
Sometime after 3 a.m., cyclists start to appear. All over rural Rwanda, sinewy
young men set out from their homes on heavy steel single-speed bikes that are
almost invisible beneath comically oversized loads: bunches of green bananas
strapped together onto cargo racks; sacks of tomatoes piled two or three high;
dozens of live chickens stacked in pyramids of beaks and feathers; bundles of
cassava leaves so massive that, in the predawn light, it looks as though
shrubbery is rolling along the side of the road. Over the next four or five
hours, as the heat of the day sets in, gradually wilting the cassava leaves and
softening the tomatoes, these men will cover hundreds of miles, carrying food
from the countryside to sell in markets in the capital, Kigali."
Via
The Fixer August 17, 2022:
Looking for a long read? Check out this feature on how refrigeration, a
technology many Westerners take for granted, could be a game-changer for
reducing hunger in Africa.
If you’re interested in hidden systems and how they affect our daily lives,
this story is a fascinating read. As one of its characters puts it, “We are
able to dream things that are beyond what is imaginable, and then act on
them. Or at least try.”
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/cooling-system-paris-seine-water-pipes/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
