Earlier today, NourishingthePlanet wrote a diary The Barefoot College. The title tweaked my interest because of possibilities within that name. Did it concern programs for pregnant college-aged women or a specific poverty-stricken demographic? With the freewheeling dkos diaries --you never know what you get until you open it. It could have been a diary about walking on hot coals.
But, it was a pleasant surprise to find a diary about a college in Tilonia, Rajasthan in India that teaches how to harness solar energy to alleviate poverty and hunger and build stronger communities. Women from around the world are recruited to this small college in India to study solar engineering for six months. Then they return to their homes and villages where they share their skills and knowledge with their community, and everyone can build upon the skills that one person learned and shared.
Anyway, the diary was much too short and contained a few paragraphs --just enough to pique my interest, but not satiate my hunger for knowing more. So, let’s explore a little further on this topic of empowering women to rebuild their communities in a sustainable positive manner.
Barefoot College
This solar engineering college is training women from all over the world --many of whom are grandmothers. The founder says “men are simply too restless and that women are much more likely to take the knowledge back to share with their communities.” The curriculum is a "common language" composed of symbols, signs and colors since these women come from a wide variety of nations across the world.
Barefoot College was established by Sanjit “Bunker” Roy. Bunker Roy was one of Time magazine’s 2010 annual top 100 people who most affect our world and his Barefoot College has trained more than 3 million people for the jobs in their communities that fight poverty: “solar engineers, teachers, midwives, weavers, architects, doctors and more.”
The layout of this college is simple -- it has dirt floors and no chairs. It was “designed to make poor students feel comfortable.”
The Barefoot Campus itself provides visitors with a demonstration of exactly how efficient solar energy can be in rural communities. The electricity for the entire College is solar-generated—women eat three meals a day from stoves that use solar energy and night classes take place thanks to solar-powered lanterns.
The sun provides enough energy in one hour to power everything on this planet for an entire year.
Harnessing that power for rural communities is critical to development and to alleviate poverty and hunger. With redistributed cell phones from the developed world and developing a cellular network powered by solar energy across Africa and India, one single cell phone in a village provides access to -- "market prices for crops, weather reports and health information."
Like the old saying, "Feed a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life." Teaching people how to harness and build better communities around solar energy empowers them to create the best uses for their local needs from this sustainable, renewable free energy source.
So, in the foreseeable future, while Northern Africa certainly has enough solar energy to help power a solar grid for Europe, the resources and funding to build an African solar grid can just as easily be accomplished.
And our TopComments cupboard was rather bare today and runneth over solely with spam.
Regardless, THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to share these gems with the community.
From Ed Tracey:
It's been a strange week for Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) - as he implausibly spoke on the Senate floor siding with the newly-arrested (former) Ivory Coast president "Happy Face" Laurent Gbagbo, both RhodaA as well as zonk perceptively picked up on the report noting Gbagbo's ties to the C Street crowd.... and hence Inhofe's praise.
And then on the subject of Inhofe's not-so-excellent adventure this past December at a Texas airport - ht dave went on to observe thusly, "Inhofe has his own reality, where climate change doesn't exist and little people (like construction workers) don't exist".
From sardonyx:
cskendrick starts an interesting thread with a question, and zonk looks at some answers.
From bronte17:
Just a thought... from cadejo4… the para-state employment effect of "rebalancing the economy” when public monies fund private jobs in How much Private Sector Employment is Created by the Public Sector? by pkohan.
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entlord provided clinical instructions on how our lawmakers should be educated in the female anatomy "beyond that presented each month in Playboy or Hustler" in the hilarious (but very serious) diary Went for my First Drug Store GYN Exam Today by JaciCee.
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