When the Sun Saves Lives
January 16th, 2008 at 5:27 pm | posted by Amy Quinn, ONE Volunteer, Los Angeles, CA.
On Sunday ONE LA and ONE Santa Monica co-hosted a team meeting at the Church in Ocean Park in Santa Monica. Rachel Andres, of Jewish World Watch, was our guest speaker and spoke to us about the Solar Cooker Project.
Right now, women and girls in refugee camps in Chad risk rape and other forms of gender-based violence when leaving the relative safety of the camps to collect firewood – which is essential for cooking the basic food supplies provided by relief agencies.
Solar Cookers are devises that cook food using electricity from the sun’s rays and the Solar Cooker Project aims to improve the safety and survival of women in refugee camps in Chad.
Rachel gave an emotional presentation about this wonderful project and her very recent visit to two refugee camps in Chad where the project has been put to work.
The Solar Cookers are built by the women of the camps, providing some of them with the rare opportunity for employment. Rachel spoke movingly about the similarities between the refugees and ourselves. For example, when someone dies, the families bring the surviving family food – just like we do here. The women said their only complaint about the solar cooker was that the pots were a little too small to make enough food for the times when they had guests (a concern we also share – nervousness about preparing a meal for guests). What was moving about this -was that these people have very little food to share – and yet they still did so, willingly and happily. They even offered Rachel and the two other women from JWW water – which is even more scarce than food.
There are about 20,000 people living in each of the refugee camps that they visited and Rachel noted that she did not see one single toy amongst the thousands of children living there. The children, instead, made use of what they had - sticks and rocks and each other.
Somehow, hope remained on their faces. Rachel and the others kept telling them that there are thousands of Americans and people all of the world that care that they are there and that are trying to help them go home again. This made them very happy.
The Solar Cooker Project is special because it is a very tangible way we can make a difference in the lives of a refugee family. Their hope is to expand the project to all of the camps and that it will continue to save lives and improve the health and welfare of the men, women and children of Darfur.
After the meeting, I asked the ONE attendees if they felt that this was a worthwhile event and without exception, they all expressed how much they enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to learn about some of the issues in more detail from someone who had actually been there. We hope to provide our members with a variety of educational speakers moving forward.
We believe that knowledge is power and that by educating our team we can become better advocates for the issues that surround global poverty.
The motto of Jewish World Watch is, “Never Again.” JWW is a member of the Save Darfur Coalition and for more information you can visit their website www.jewishworldwatch.org or www.savedarfur.org
-Amy Quinn, ONE LA Volunteer Leader
January 18th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Solar ovens are such a useful invention! Not only a real solution for the women in the refugee camps, they also will allow anyone in a remote village without electricity to cook, without over-using local wood resources. They are even available for consumers in the US, who want to reduce their energy usage and “carbon footprint.” You can find many sites now on the web selling them! Hope this project takes off!