Hi
First of all, your caps lock key seems to be stuck. Please don't SHOUT, not even in your headlines. It's annoying and puts people off reading your post.
i rEALLY hATE tHIS dAMNED cAPS lOCK kEY
Now to your batteries. If you have the opportunity to have them fully charged before commissioning the system, I would certainly take it. When I have had new batteries for my boat, I have always made sure the vendor has charged them before I install them. It is so much more convenient to charge the batteries in the shop with a good battery charger than on an anchored boat with no shore power.
I don't particularly relish the idea of sitting on the boat for a day running my engine to charge batteries, and I don't want to have to wait until the solar panels have brought them up to full charge before I can use power without having to worry about the state of my batteries. It can take a long time to bring a battery bank up from 50 to 100% with RE sources when you are consuming power at the same time. You will be in a similar situation where your only charging source will be your RE system, perhaps even with no way of using infernal combustions to charge them.
Completely discharging lead acid batteries WILL damage them. How much it will damage them will depend on the quality of the batteries and how long they are left discharged, but it will always cause some damage. In a situation such as yours where the end users may be less than technically proficient, I would strongly urge you to install some sort of circuit that will prevent the batteries from being discharged lower than 50%.
I spent a year in Cape Verde on my previous boat. I found that in those cases where cruisers had to leave the country with a local boatsitter looking after their yacht, they would invariably come back to terminally dead batteries. It was simply impossible to explain the basics of battery management to the locals. When I left my own boat in the hands of a local boatsitter for five weeks while I was delivering another yacht, I disabled everything except the led anchor light and two led reading lights. With 100W worth of PV panels, there was no way he could discharge my batteries even if he left the lights on all the time. I came back to fully charged batteries in good condition.
The boatsitter who looked after my boat had previously looked after the boat I delivered from Mindelo to the Azores. The batteries on that boat were terminal. I had tried several times to tell him that he must run the engine and charge up to 14.2 V as soon as the batteries were down to 12V. I found that he had occasionally run the engine to bring the batteries up to 12V and then stopped the engine...
If I was designing a RE system for a third world location, one of the most important things on my mind would be to make it as foolproof as possible. I'm not saying that Africans are any dumber than us. Some of the smartest people I know are Africans, but unlike us, they have not lived with technology since the day they were born and they have a lot of catching up to do. I know I would look pretty dumb alone in the jungle...
Regards, Owen
Yacht "Magic"
Anchored in the lagoon, French St. Martin