Solar Cooker Report

Dear Steve,

This is a short report letting you know how we succeeded in our workshop trip to San Andrés. This trip was one of the activities paid for by your small grants. Susan and I went to San Andrés by way of Costa Rica to do workshops at the Christian University there the week of February 10 - 17.

Our first stop was at the home of Shyam Nandwande, a professor at the Universidad Nacional there in Costa Rica. Shyam is one of the world's experts on solar cookers and a friend who has come here to Nicaragua to give parts of our Fenix solar cooker workshops. It was good to compare notes on our latest ideas on the subject (and also to rest after our 9 1/2 hour bus ride from Managua. We also met up with a couple of friends of Susan: Diego, who works for the Friends Center in San Jose and Iliana, who teaches part of a semester overseas program for Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. After the overnight visit with them we now plan to have a Fenix solar workshop for their groups, and Iliana's students will visit the UNI and Fenix next month on their excursion to Nicaragua.

We flew to San Andrés on Monday (The only day the small but expensive plane makes the trip) and were met at the airport by Dr. George May, the rector of the Christian University and our host. After a tour of the Island and informal discussions on the classes and students, we had the first of a set of three workshops with the group of 45 participants from both the University community and the local island people. We had seminars on solar energy in general and hands on work shops on both solar box cookers and making small PV modules. We ended up making 14 cardboard solar box cookers (which the participants got to take home) and 4 small four cell PV modules (which the groups of participants will get to keep after they have follow-up meetings next week) The response was quite amazing. Everybody was waiting for us to start the sessions at the time given on the program (almost unheard of on this "laid-back" island) and everybody wanted to continue with some sort of continuous program in solar energy. We left San Andrés on Friday morning (again the only flight possible) and stayed overnight again with our friends in Costa Rica before getting the bus back to Managua on Saturday morning.

The San Andrés trip is already having a follow up; one of our volunteers form the US and one of the Fenix people who speaks English well will be going off to there in April to do a solar water heater workshop. They speak "Mother Tongue" there, which is a form of English similar to Jamaica's and all the classes at the Christian University are in English. Lots of political ramifications to that since San Andrés belongs to Columbia and the government insists that everybody speak Spanish in government schools. The feud between Columbia and Nicaragua over the island is one reason why we had to go to Costa Rica to get there. The school is Baptist but a "laid-back" sort of English Protestantism that values community spirit much more than doctrinal Fundamentalism. Stewardship of the earth is emphasized rather than antievolution rhetoric. Susan and I enjoyed the week greatly, especially swimming every morning at the town beach.

We spent a little over $1100 of the $2500 grant on this trip and are using more of it right now to pay for a wooden box cooker workshop Jaime Muñuz is teaching in northern Nicaragua. He will also be building some improved design solar cookers which will be instrumented to test some of our ideas of how to get these devices to work in somewhat cloudy
locations. The Christian University is now looking for the money for the next Fenix workshop there.

Two of us are going off to Honduras next week to give the solar part of a workshop on microdrip irrigation using solar powered pumps. This will be for CARE International and is the second week I will have spent off in another country, (My passport is filling up with stamps and stickers and I may have to get a new one before the 10 years is up.)

This trip will be paid for by CARE and I think it will lead to some exciting possibilities in sustainable village life. Please stay in touch and thank you very much for helping to make this work possible. I have some more ideas for Sustainable Village projects that I will put together soon in a letter. Our main focus right now is getting our microloan program going, but the microdrip irrigation work might lead to Fenix activities up in the parts of Nicaragua where they are having bad drought conditions. Thanks, Rich