Glastonbury 2014
Pedal Out of Poverty
On Sunday the 22nd of June 2014, myself and my team (consisting of messieurs’s Gleaves, Koomar, Kelly, Proctor and Kazamia) loaded up the pair of vehicles we were planning to take down to Glastonbury festival, with both the materials needed for the pedal powered phone charging stall and a whole host of necessary survival supplies for the week. The following morning, after one last full nights sleep we added the final bits and pieces to the cars and we were all set to be off by 12 without any major alarms.
The rest of the day however was not as smooth sailing as we would have liked. 11. 55am. Disaster. There had been a bit of an error in communication between Mlambe Project representatives Jamie Proctor and Saalim Koomar, resulting in the rear windscreen of Mr. Koomars car being smashed by a stray piece of metal from the bike rack. The end result was a 2 hour detour into Guildford in order to get the thing repaired. The combination of the windscreen incident and a pit stop at a Tesco in Andover for more necessary survival supplies, meant that we cut the 8pm deadline to enter the festival very fine, but just about made it. A great team effort meant that we got the marquee up just before nightfall, and after some very welcome hotdogs prepared by Mr. Kelly, we got some much needed rest.
The day that followed was an absolute scorcher, perfect weather for decorating the stall. An all hands on deck approach was adopted, with the end result below:
Decorating the stall.
Satisfied with our day's work, we retired to our sleeping quarters at the back of the stall, in preparation for our first day open for business. With both renewable phone charging and free earthbag talks on offer, expectations were high.
Trialling the bike.
The Wednesday, Thursday and Friday brought about a downturn in weather conditions, and with it large numbers of festival-goers with fully charged mobile phones. However, despite the phone charging side of things not being quite as busy as we had hoped, we still attracted a lot of interest in chatting to festival punters and telling them all about the fantastically economical method of using earthbags to build.
We remained, as ever, very optimistic about the weekend's prospects, and as the Saturday afternoon sun came out to play over the Green fields of Pilton, business began to boom. The team did a superb job of not only making sure that the phone charging equipment was well maintained, but also talking to customers and making sure that we spread the stories of the brilliant work that the Mlambe project has done over in Malawi.
Jamie tending to the intricate charging system.
We took in over 200 phones through the course of the festival and managed to raise ￡500 for The Mlambe project. It was a magnificent experience building on the success of the charity's presence at the festival in 2013, and we very much look forward to seeing what Glastonbury 2015 has in store for us.
Joe Charnaud
