Sun Fire Cooking, June 2005 newsletter

26 June 2005  

Dear Friends of Sun Fire Cooking  

This time I thought I would just give you a brief narrative a few eclectically selected photos taken in Bosaso and the surrounding area to give you a glimpse of Somali life.  

Jim sunfirecooking@yahoo.com .

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  Goats and sheep are northern Somalia's principal export. The black headed sheep is especially prized in the Middle East. It's very unusual to see an adult sheep suckling a goat. .

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Goats are everywhere, even in Bosaso town, they always seem to always manage to find something to eat.  

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  Bosaso is a busy town of perhaps a 100,000 people.

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.<   Almost all Bosaso's cooking fuel is either charcoal or wood which now has to be trucked from more than 100 kilometres away.

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   It's a forbidding, though beautiful, landscape. How do people manage to live in such an environment? Event though there are sizable town such as Bosaso most Somalis live in rural areas. Many of them are nomadic. This way of life is threatened by the destruction of the environment. Indiscriminate cutting of trees for charcoal plays a significant part in this negative impact.

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  Sun Fire's solar cooker is much faster than a similar sized cooker which is made in Europe and is distributed in many developing countries. The cooker on the left took 47 minutes to boil one litre of water. Sun Fire's cooker on the right took just 7 minutes.

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  We have recruited some ten volunteers to help train people to use the cookers. Here they are checking that everything is adjusted just right. We have learned you cannot just sell the cooker. Follow up visits are required to make sure people know how to use the cooker. Without a training and education program our cookers will join the others which have been distributed by well meaning aid agencies as just so much rusting scrap metal.

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  Some teashops are using the solar cooker. You can see the simple nature of the teashops which are little more than a few chairs set out in the street. they are very popular and are to be found everywhere. Ginger is added to the tea plus an inordinate amount of sugar. Sun Fire Cooking is establishing it's own tea shop where everything will be done on solar cookers. As you can see from this example, capital investment is minimal.

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We hosted the head of the Puntland State of Somalia's Humanitarian Aid Office to a solar cooked lunch. The head, Nuruddin Dire is an English educated Somali who is one of the members of Tony Blair's advisory panel for Africa. Nuruddin was impressed and he can see the obvious financial and environmental advantages. We have also shown the cooker to Max Gaylard, the head of the United Nations Development Programme for Somalia. In conjunction with a local aid organization we have submitted a proposal to use some of the tsunami relief money to make one of the tsunami affected regions, Bender Bayla, a model solar cooking community.  

We have asked Nuruddin to use his contacts with Tony Blair to put solar cookers on his agenda ahead of the G8 summit. Tony Blair talks so much about aid to Africa and the environment and climate change that it seems logical he should be interested in solar cookers.