dear sci board colleagues:
kakuma refugee camp awoke this morning to a very unusual sound, that of rain drops pattering on our roofs. for the most part, the weather here is as good as one finds for solar cooking, with full and very hot sun nearly all of every day. our frequent statement that foods do not overcook definitely needs revising, if persons here are to read it, for we have empirical evidence that foods can and do overcook! one day we left rolls behind in the cooker, only to find them far more like rusks than rolls!
we want to describe a bit of our experience for you, in advance of the upcoming board meeting, by which time we expect those experiences to be a bit better digested than at present. so please think of this as a kind of interim report on our activities, with full conclusions to come later.
jay, barbara, bev and faustine odabe (a member of the kenyan solar cooking group and solar cooker par excellence) arrived in kakuma on january 10. two days later, we held our first workshop, a kind of "trial run" for a number of staff members and refugee women leaders to test out our plan. on the following monday, we began the first of six full scale workshops, each with twelve women trainees. participants were selected from a number of the major refugee communities which make up the camp population. out only selection criterion was that the women should live reasonably close to one another. each of the workshops has been a bit different, as we have honed the process and content for effectiveness and efficiency.
the overall plan, which begins with the workshop, also includes a series of home visits and a number of group meetings, all of which are designed to provide information, build solar cooking competence on the part of our participants, and provide us with information requisite to answering our major question, namely the feasibility of solar cooking in the refugee situation.
our participants are of many ethnicity's. two groups are oromos, a people who lived in ethiopia and have for centuries felt themselves to be ill treated by the ruling amharic population. another group was made up of ethiopian women; a fourth was a mixed group with zaireans, ugandans, rwandans and somalis. sudanese women comprised the other two groups; that population is the vast majority of the camp's occupants and in many ways, the most difficult group to work with. over half of the total of women participants have had no formal education at all. all of our workshops went well; for the most part, women were enthusiastic at the potential of fuel savings that solar cooking represents, since they are given only a very small fraction of the firewood they need for cooking, when their supplied ration is used, they must exchange food for wood, scrounge from the ground for anything burnable, beg from their neighbors, or, for a few lucky ones with employment, purchase their requirements. the other benefits, cleanliness, nutritional aspects, freedom from smoke inhalation, etc. are also noted by many.
from the home visits and group meetings, we know that for most the solar cooker is proving to be very useful and appreciated. (in fact, a major problem for us throughout has been the consistent demand from others who were not chose as participants.) the women have cooked their basic ration of maize meal, wheat flour and beans routinely, and have adventurously branched out into a variety of new uses, including vegetables, meat and fish, a variety of breads, porridge, etc. in general, our data shows that, with a few exception, the majority of the women are using the cooker on every sunny day when they have food to cook (which is not every day, we were sad to learn.) additional rounds of home visits will give us a more detailed final estimate of numbers.
this week saw the conclusion of the series of workshops presented by our team; we move now to a second phase, in which we will train refugee women to conduct the workshops in their own communities. we will equip each of six teams of women with pots and lids, cookers and bags, food for demonstration and trials at home by their participants. so the very real test of the dissemination process is in the next few months. we believe there is every reason to think that passing on solar cooking knowledge can be done as well or better by women to others of their own groups, eliminating the need for translation and the possible misunderstandings that entails. the logistics of managing the process is however more daunting, for the staff members who will do the work, while more than willing, face all of the logistical problems we have had to deal with. i.e. lack of transport, camp bureaucracy, time constraints, etc. but we feel strongly that our resources should be spent in empowering refugee people to do things for themselves; we also believe that information of this sort spreads most naturally from woman to woman within her own circle of friends and neighbors, the basis of our entire mode of operation.
there are problems aplenty! the lack of usable pots and lids has been a constant difficulty. we believe it was an error not to provide those from the first, comparable to trying to teach a person any new skill with only half of the required equipment. pots and lids which are too large have split many a bag; the latter were in short supply until we recently located a kenyan made supply. the weather has stopped us only one day, when cloud cover made cooking very slow; another day kakuma was visited by a dust storm which made visibility almost nil and cooking very hard. for us personally, the environment is harsh, with very high temperatures daily; the lack of transport, as anticipated, has cost us many frustrating hours of waiting around, which could have more profitably spent in other ways. but our housing is adequate, the food acceptable, the hospitality extended to us by staff and refugee alike a high point in our days here. we hear virtually no news and feel cut off from the world by the lack of newspapers or phone service, and of course we miss our loved ones at home very much.
we wanted you to have a brief taste of our experience before we see you in person. both of us have learned a great deal from this experience and hope very much the benefits over time will repay the effort we, you as board members, our staff and all our donors have contributed to this project.
we look forward to seeing you in march.
warmest greetings,
jay and barbara