Turneffe College - Chapter 03 - by Polly+Anna (2710 words) Beth, Cheryl and Howard (1/28/20)
I checked my mail at lunch time, and there was a slip in my mailbox saying that I had a package behind the counter. Not wanting to drag it along to my afternoon class I came back later for it. As I suspected it contained a pair of Brazilian carburetors that had made their way to an island in Belize by way of Van Nuys California, a lesson in world - or at least Western Hemisphere - geography.
I knew that neither Howard nor Cheryl were back from their classes yet, so I took the box into the dormitory lounge and opened it on the coffee table there. Cheryl hates it when I open boxes of oily metal auto parts in my room. But the Kadrons were far more interesting to me than the classes I had taken this morning.
My second year of Environmental Studies at Turneffe College was really dragging. I just can't wait to graduate so I can get into a good Chemical Engineering program somewhere and rid myself of the jerk-knee-reflex of professors who recoil in fear when I talk about BTUs and bacteria.
My current project in the "hippie commune," so named because it is a collection of rapidly decaying plywood shanties, is making biodiesel fuel. A poorly planned and worse executed firetrap the E.S. department sits in a swamp away from all of the other buildings on campus.
Last year Howard built a beautiful solar air conditioner for the lab. Of course the know-it-all professors turned the orientation of the thermal collector 30 degrees off optimal "for aesthetics," and moved the condensation collector halfway down the cooling tubes "for convenience," and substituted less conductive plastic pipe for galvanized metal and omitted the pea gravel "for economy."
They "improved" his design down to about 50 percent efficiency. Oddly enough the dirt that they inexpensively substituted for pea gravel turns into mud as condensate is collected - I mean, who knew that condensate was water. But it still worked. It has a high degree of automation in that with more direct sunlight, the rooftop collector moves more air out of the structure's interior drawing more cool air into the building through the cooling tubes.
Once his bachelor's degree is in hand, Howard is hoping to enter the Architecture Program at the University of Miami. I hope to follow him there. My project this semester is basically making diesel fuel from waste cooking oil. Which some places will actually pay you to collect.
Mix in a little bit of lye and a dash of my methanol from last year's project - a solar digester, and voilà almost cost-free BTUs. Okay, like everything in life there is a cost, but the cost was mostly paid for refining the food-grade vegetable oil in the first place. The remaining cost is actually less than properly disposing of the non-palatable waste.
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My solar digester uses the ubiquitous tropical sedge erroneously termed sawgrass; another feedstock people will pay you to collect and remove. But it could use any carbon dense farm waste. Once I modify them a bit these 40mm Kadrons will scream on the oval in bracket races supplying that methanol to my under 1000cc class 4.
I'm Beth, my polygamous American hippy parents named me Elizabeth after a great aunt, but I have always preferred Beth. And I love going fast and playing hard. While most of my professors here chill, smoke their home-grown weed and listen to their Jimi Hendrix and Country Joe cassette tapes I prefer a more natural "high," endocannabinoids. I started with cycling, that well known "gateway activity," but in time I became a gearhead, cart racer and a tuner.
Howard is like me, I guess that's why we really hit it off. A year ago, just a few days into college he just had to meet the "new girl" who knew a wrench from a pair of pliers, thought that Castrol 20W50 smelled better than White Diamonds, and was building a go-kart out of an old riding mower in an industrial design class. There was something special about him, a thoughtful playfulness. The first time we spoke he put a dab of blue valve lapping compound on my nose.
He was a big cyclist too, so we do a lot of that together. I felt a little weird bringing him back to my house on Ambergris Caye over my first Christmas break. To say that my family is different is quite the understatement. While Karen has just one mom, and Howard, Andrew, Stuart and Cheryl have one mom and one dad apiece... While Jim has two moms, I have three moms and two dads - and five brothers and sisters.
Howard actually thought that it was all kind of neat, that in spite of all this parental supervision available. I grew up in a house with but two rules. Rule one was be the person you were created to be. Rule two is take care of your siblings. So, since he gets along great with my many parents and we live on this this nice long island that we could ride our bikes on, he has visited often.
Howard is Garifuna, he's from Punta Gorda, which is the opposite end of Belize from Ambergris Caye - not that its such a big country. The Garifuna are an ethnic mixture of mostly African and Amerindian peoples with just a slight seasoning of shipwrecked Scots, Mayans and East Indians.
Traditionally the men were fishermen and the women ran the village and raised the children. As a result, couples with children often do not get married or live together, so when we went to visit Howard's family it was kind of like visiting friends whose parents were divorced, except that Howard's mom and dad liked one another and never fought.
Actually, Garifuna really never fight among themselves or with others. Hippie chick and Garifuna dude, we have lots in common. Like until we tried it with one another as a form of sexual foreplay, neither of us had ever, in our eighteen years of life up until that point, been spanked.
