Humanitarian
Three Bedford, NH High Students are hosting a summer KIDZ camp June 24-28, 2013 to raise money to go to Nicaragua on the Color My World Vounteer Nicaragua 2013 trip, August 5-12, 2013. They asked me to post this flyer here for local moms.
We have done their KIDZ Camp with all of our kids. These are great girls!
Bedford family helps Nicaraguans with solar cooker project
By KATHY REMILLARD
Union Leader Correspondent
BEDFORD – Global community service is not a new concept to the Hughes family – in fact, they established their own foundation, Color My World, to support it.
“We started off as a means to distribute hygiene kits,” said Angela Hughes, director of Color My World, which included toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap and towels to donate to those stricken by disaster, both here at home and abroad.
The foundation began to branch out even further when Hughes’ son Chase introduced the concept of solar cooking on Color My World’s first mission trip to Costa Rica in 2011, which takes advantage of the sun’s rays to produce cooking heat.
The cooker is similar to a crock pot, Hughes said, and requires about 12 hours of sunlight to run effectively.
“We’ve traveled all over the world,” Hughes said. “One of the biggest problems people have is that they have to go search for their wood and chop down trees to cook every day.”
When the family went to Mexico in December, they again saw people hauling wood on bicycles to bring back to their villages, and remembering their solar cooker project, decided to take action.
Hughes did some research and chose Jiquilillo, Nicaragua as the location for the family’s next philanthropic adventure, and they spent a week there at the end of February.
“I took a risk,” Hughes said, knowing that they’d never traveled to the country before. “We headed out the door hoping to meet the right people, and we did.”
The family – Angela, husband Brian, and three of the couple’s four children, Chase, Noah and Elizabeth – ended up staying at a lodge owned by Gerry Caseres, president of the citizens conservation committee in the town, who offered to help them get set up.
“He helped us put together our audience and our Spanish translator, and facilitated the arrangements of our other projects,” Hughes said.
Caseras told Hughes that the project was more of a conservation effort than any health or medical project he could think of.
“We are cutting down more than 1 hector of trees a week (1,200 trees,)” he said. “My goal is to work with Color My World to bring in solar cookers to 2000 families in this community.”
Hughes said that while the cookers were successful, they knew they were also introducing a cultural shift, especially for women, who often spent all day cooking.
“We were cooking in a completely different way, and teaching a completely different way of life,” Hughes said.
The villagers also began to bake items, like brownies, and sell them to tourists.
“All of a sudden, people making 2-3 dollars a day were selling brownies at $1 apiece and making $20 a day,” Hughes said.
Villagers were left with templates and instructions on how to make their own solar cookers.
“You have to be sustainable,” Hughes said. “You can go and give people everything, but there is that ‘teach a man to fish’ principle.”
In a country where survival is a 24-hour mission, Hughes said such abject poverty made an impression on them.
“They don’t have anything,” she said. “It’s almost unimaginable for someone from Bedford to see those conditions.”
Still, the villagers were happy with what they had, Hughes said, and grateful for the assistance.
“You have to remember that people have dignity – they’re not just projects or photos,” she said.
The Hughes’ have committed to return trips to the area, and hope to track how many people continue to use the cookers.
The service work is a way of life for the family, and Hughes wants it to stay that way.
“Our kids have grown up with the foundation,” she said. “I want them to be humanitarians.”
Bedford family helps Nicaraguan villagers use solar cooking
By IRENE LABOMBARDE
Staff Writer
Imagine living in a shack without electricity, appliances or running water, where food is cooked indoors over an open fire. Most of your time and energy is spent cutting and gathering enough wood to fuel the fires just to feed your family. There is no time to learn a trade, run a business or engage in leisurely pursuits. Now, imagine how different life could be if there were an easier, safer way to cook that freed up your time and resources.
Angela and Brian Hughes, of Bedford, along with three of their four children, spent school vacation in February in Nicaragua doing just that. By providing solar cookers and water pasteurizers and teaching people how to use them, the family was able to change lives.
Established by the Hughes family in 2000, Color My World: Kids Who Care is a nonprofit organization leading a global effort to relieve human suffering by providing emergency response relief items and humanitarian services to those in need. Color My World is about helping young people get involved in service-related activities. Past projects have included providing hurricane and tsunami victims with hygiene kits and backpacks stocked with school supplies.
The organization was founded by the four siblings, Hillary, 18, currently in China and teaching English while learning Chinese; Chase, 15 a freshman at Trinity High School in Manchester; Noah, 12, who is homeschooled, and Elizabeth, 9, a third-grader at Peter Woodbury School.
How does solar cooking work?
Solar cookers have a reflective surface and use energy from sunlight. Within a few minutes, temperatures reach 100 degrees, and can get as hot as 300 degrees. Bread and eggs are easy to cook, and you can bake or roast foods for longer periods of time, like you would in a crockpot.
Color My World’s first humanitarian mission was two years ago, when Chase taught a solar cooking workshop to villagers in San Ramon, Costa Rica. The Hughes spent their 2012 Christmas break in Mexico, where they noticed, again, families pedaling bikes with carts of wood and cooking over open fires. At this point they decided to take action.
Why Nicaragua?
Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, behind Haiti. The climate sees temperatures and humidity both in the 90s. More than one hectare (1,200) of trees are cut down every week just for cooking fires, with very little replanting. Color My World ran a social media campaign to collect funds to pay for solar cookers at $25 each, and water pasteurizers at $10 each, with many people in southern New Hampshire contributing to the project. The family stayed in a fishing village on the northwest coast of Nicaragua, at their own expense.
Challenges
“Cooking over an open fire indoors in shacks not only causes health and lung problems, but people spend all day looking for trees,” said Angela Hughes, Color My World director. “Women often get raped or abused when they are in the forest looking for trees. They spend so much time cooking they can’t focus on building the economy, they can’t look for a job. Then there is the environmental issue. By cutting so many mangrove trees, the whole ecosystem is incomplete.”
Color My World enlisted the help of Gerry Caseres, president of a citizens’ conservation committee and co-owner of the lodge where the Hughes family stayed. Among other things, Caseres made arrangements for their audience and provided Spanish translation services.
“This project is more of a conservation effort than any health or medical project,” Caseres told Hughes. “This is clean energy 12 hours a day.”
Color My World delivered solar cookers and water pasteurizers to 40 families in Jiquillio. Hughes said there was a learning curve in getting the villagers to accept the solar cookers, because they had been accustomed to cooking over an open fire, and this is a radically different method. They also taught them how to make additional solar cookers using aluminum foil and cardboard.
Immediate benefits
“I was surprised how intense the sun was down there,” Chase Hughes said. “In the first five minutes of using the solar cooker, the pot we were cooking with burned my hand. They heat up to nearly 300 degrees and within two hours we had cooked rice. All of the women were super excited to take a solar cooker home.”
Within a few days of their training, several women made baked goods on the solar cooker and sold their brownies and cakes for a $1 each to the tourists at the lodge. They were able to earn $20 in one night, compared to the $1-4 a day a family usually makes in the work force.
“Solar cookers empower women,” Angela Hughes said. “They provide opportunities to improve not only their family finances but their entire family unit, providing them with a smarter, healthier environment to live in.”
Other projects
In addition to solar cookers, the Hughes family also helped establish a sustainable community garden. The land was cultivated and prepared for the upcoming planting season, with crops expected to include tomatoes, potatoes, onions, peppers and mangoes.
“Working in the community garden was some of the hardest work we did,” Noah said. “The ground was so dry because it hadn’t rained for months. We had to move cement blocks and weed ground that was hard as a rock.”
They also hosted a lunch at the garbage dump community of Chinandega, Nicaragua.
“There are people who live on the fringe of the dump to find food,” Hughes said. “Hurricane Mitch displaced many of them, and it’s a shanty town. There is free-flowing sewage, broken glass, and kids running around naked with no shoes, potbellied from malnutrition.”
The Hughes family also played baseball with local children, and provided them with hygiene kits containing basic items like toothbrushes, toothpaste, a comb, soap, and a hand towel. They hosted a lunch at the local elementary school.
“The kids have to walk to school from miles away in the heat and they don’t have a kitchen at school,” Elizabeth said. “We cut up potatoes, fish and rice and made them lunch, and then we sang songs and played musical instruments with them. I couldn’t understand Spanish, but we played a lot. It was really fun playing hula hoop with them and teaching them jump rope tricks.”
Long-term goal
Color My World is doing a case study to see what takes place with the new cookers and the knowledge presented. They are committed to bringing more than 2000 additional solar cookers to families in Jiquillio in the next few years, and would like to raise $5,000 to build a kitchen at the Los Zorros School.
Toward that end, Color My World hopes to invite local clubs such as Kiwanis Club and Lions Club to partner to strengthen the program to create a sister city in Nicaragua with Bedford. Community members would be invited to work and serve alongside Color My World in Nicaragua.
“Part of our goal is to help people move towards developmental travel,” Hughes said. “You can go places and have an impact.”
We introduced solar cooking to the village of Jiquillo, Nicaragua and donated 100 cookers to the community.
Here are some photos of our workshop in the community. This is such a new idea to them and so very valuable!
Solar cooking is the simplest, safest, most convenient way to cook food without consuming fuels or heating up the kitchen. Many people choose to solar cook for these reasons. But for hundreds of millions of people around the world who cook over fires fueled by wood or dung, and who walk for miles to collect wood or spend much of their meager incomes on fuel, solar cooking is more than awomen carrying wood choice — it is a blessing. For millions of people who lack access to safe drinking water and become sick or die each year from preventable waterborne illnesses, solar water pasteurization is a life-saving skill. There are numerous reasons to cook the natural way — with the sun.
Benefits to:
households
health professionals
businesses
governments
humanitarian, development and relief organizations
environmental programs
Benefits to households
HEALTH AND NUTRITION
Moderate cooking temperatures in simple solar cookers help preserve nutrients.
Those who otherwise could not afford the fuel to do so can cook nutritious foods — such as legumes and many whole grains — that require hours of cooking.
At times many families must trade scarce food for cooking fuel. Solar cooking helps them to keep more food and improve their nutrition.smoky cooking fire
Smoky cooking fires irritate lungs and eyes and can cause diseases. Solar cookers are smoke-free.
Cooking fires are dangerous, especially for children, and can readily get out of control — causing damage to buildings, gardens, etc. Solar cookers are fire-free.
Millions of women routinely walk for miles to collect fuel wood for cooking. Burdensome fuel-gathering trips can cause injuries, and expose women to danger from animals and criminals. Solar cooking reduces these risks and burdens, and frees time for other activities.
With good sunlight, solar cookers can be used to cook food or pasteurize water during emergencies when other fuels and power sources may not be available.
ECONOMICS
Many poverty-stricken families worldwide spend 25% or more of their income on cooking fuel. Sunlight — solar cooker “fuel” — is free and abundant. Money saved can be used for food, education, health care, etc.
Solar cooker businesses can provide extra income. Opportunities include cooker manufacturing, sales and repair, as well as solar food businesses like restaurants and bakeries.
CONVENIENCE
At moderate solar cooking temperatures food doesn’t need to be stirred and won’t burn — food can simply be placed in a solar cooker and left to cook, unattended, for several hours while other activities are pursued. In the right circumstances it is possible to put a solar cooker out in the morning and return home in the late afternoon to a hot meal ready to eat.
Pots used for solar cooking are easy to clean — a fact especially valuable for women who must walk many kilometers to collect water.
Many solar cookers are portable, allowing for solar cooking at work sites or while pursuing outdoor activities like picnics, trekking or camping.
OTHER HOUSEHOLD USES FOR SOLAR COOKERS
solar canning
Heat water for household chores.
Preserve (“can”) tomatoes and fruits.
Sanitize dishes and utensils.
Kill insects in grains and other dry food staples.
… and many more!
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Benefits to health professionals
Many solar cookers can be used to disinfect dry medical supplies such as medical instruments, bandages and other cloth materials, as well as to heat compresses.
Indoor smoke from cooking fires leads to childhood pneumonia, responsible for over four million deaths per year. Solar cookers are smoke-free.
Preventable waterborne diseases are responsible for 80% of all illnesses and deaths in the developing world. Solar cookers can be used at the household level to pasteurize water and milk, making them safe to drink. A Water Pasteurization Indicator (WAPI) can be used with a solar cooker (or traditional cooking apparatus) to determine whether water has been sufficiently heated to be safe to drink.
Solar Cooking Info :http://www.solarcookers.org/basics/why.html
We are in need of some crucial supplies from water pasteurizers $10.00 to portable solar cookers $25.00 to take to the village where we are headed!
Nicaragua is the 2nd poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and many people we will be working with, are still living in “garbage dump” conditions after Hurricane Mitch devastated the area in 1998.
If you are interested in going on one of COLOR MY WORLD’s next mission trips let me know. “Many hands make light work!”
P.S. We appreciate the support we received in our Hurricane Sandy Hygiene kit project that brought in over $30,000 in Hygiene Kits and Towels that we delivered directly to the disaster area.
We are partners/friends with StarMight Foundation of NH who will be travelling to Nicaragua in a few weeks. We are collecting school supplies for a school they are visiting. Our good friend Pat, will personally deliver the goods via horseback. If you have supplies you would like to donate, markers or colored pencils, please contact me ASAP. Must have supplies in hand by January 13, 10. We are not accepting paper or crayons due to weight and temps.
Color My World (CMW) is a non-profit 501c3 organization leading a global effort to relieve human suffering, by providing emergency response relief items and humanitarian services including sustainability projects internationally to those in need. Established in 2000 by The Hughes Family of … Read More