The journey towards becoming a Giftmaker: Settling in

My name is Merlin and in this series, I would like to share with you my journey of becoming a Giftmaker. To give you some context about myself, I am 22 years old, my mother is German, my father is Indonesian, and before coming to su-re.co to write my bachelor's thesis, I was in Zwolle, the Netherlands, doing my study, Global Project and Change Management. I have now been an intern at su-re.co for three weeks as part of the engineering team and I feel that I have already learned a lot.

The first thing I did for su-re.co was to assist in installing a biogas digester at Jiwa Community Garden in Canggu, where I learned how a biogas digester is assembled and how it is a suitable solution for climate change mitigation in countries such as Indonesia. Additionally, I learned about what kind of inputs are put into the biogas digesters (manure, food waste, and agricultural waste), that the inputs should be mixed with water, about the outputs (biogas and bio-slurry), and that the conversion happens through anaerobic digestion.

I have also returned to the biogas digester at Jiwa Community Garden multiple times in order to establish a connection between the gas meter and the online gas management system. The first challenge to overcome was to activate a SIM card. Even though this sounds like a simple task, it was more challenging than I anticipated, since the card had to be registered first which needed an ID number, as well as, a family card. Luckily, the people at Jiwa were forthcoming and provided us the needed information. Currently, we are in need of a serial port tool, to establish the connection.

Another place I visited was green school, where I learned about fermenting cacao as a strategy for adapting to climate change, as well as other land-based adaptation strategies. Furthermore, I learned that cacao trees need to be cut once in a while so that they produce higher-quality cacao, as well as how to make hot chocolate from cacao bits. Additionally, I have been learning from the daily quiz about things, such as OKR (Objective and Key Result).

Currently, I am working on making a flow diagram that showcases the process of using NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to translate the value created by the biogas digesters into carbon credits, which for me challenging, but also interesting. So far, I enjoyed the diversity of lessons learned, as well as working with the su-re.co team and I am looking forward to seeing what comes in the future.