Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007 - (Page 13)

Letter from India UNFAILING LIGHT The unfinished story of a good invention by Sam Goldman I n my years working as a Peace Corps volunteer, a student at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and as a social entrepreneur, I’ve learned the importance of story telling. I have several stories to tell you. e first is about Finagnon, a 14-year-old neighbor of mine in Guinagourou, Benin, a small town 25 kilometers from the Nigerian border. Finagnon accidentally tipped over a bottle of kerosene one night and was completely enveloped in flames. When I saw him the next day he was lying absolutely still on his stomach; silent and nude, with his eyes closed. He was covered head to toe with local medicines soothing the third-degree burns that would permanently disfigure him. Fortunately, his father, the director of the new primary school, frequently took him for hospital treatments to fight the infections that usually kill burn victims. Ours was a Bariba village, steeped in culture but little else: no running water, electricity or telephones. I spent my nights in Guinagourou cooking, reading and socializing by a kerosene lantern, just like Finagnon. My own lantern was little and blue and had been smuggled over the Nigerian border along with expired medicines, knockoff Suzuki motorcycles and recently smelted pots. e kerosene I bought was adulterated with water or diesel. It smoked badly but it was the only option for all but a handful of people in town who could afford generators. And yet the cost of kerosene was high, about 15 percent of a family’s total income. at’s like paying my social security tax all over again. I would squeeze out the last few moments of daylight before entering my house to light my lantern and I inhale fumes as I read or wrote in a small halo of light. e light was too poor for cooking, and I couldn’t read in bed for fear the light might tip over inside my mosquito net and catch fire. I ran a club promoting reforestation and battery clean-up, trained masons and built cement cisterns to store rain water, established a program to finance affordable cement latrines and worked with a team of local masons constructing dozens of latrines. When my 27-month Peace Corps service came to an end, I partnered with David Ogoudadja, a visionary Beninese man, and created Groupe d’Action et de Recherche pour la Promotion de l’Enfance to train women, nurses, and doctors about the nutritional values of Moringa oleifera, a miracle tree that has tremendous amounts of vitamins and minerals. When I left Benin 18 months later, the organization was getting ready to build a small facility to process the leaves and sell them on a commercial basis to health centers and hospitals under David’s direction and with the assistance of a new Peace Corps volunteer. However, I was thinking about how to offer cheaper, better, safer light to 90 percent of the world. t became so clear to me in Benin. Kerosene lanterns are the worst-designed light in the world, and two billion people rely on them exclusively. Literally millions of other children were suffering Fignanon’s fate. A high percentage of admissions of children under five to South African rural hospitals are the result of kerosene ingestion. Kerosene also produces an absurd amount of CO2. I am a semi-maniacal environmentalist and recently calculated that if you burn one kerosene lantern for five years you’re creating roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide as driving a car from San Francisco to New York City. Multiply that by two billion people and three lanterns per house and we have a serious problem. ere was an obvious need for solutions–and I found them in abundance, only they were everywhere except in the developing world. Toward the end of 2004, a friend gave me a headlamp with a lightemitting diode–called LEDs–which he had bought at Target for $10. I loved my little headlamp: LEDs didn’t attract bugs or produce heat and they gave a uni-directional light. Where my kerosene lantern cast wandering shadows around my hut and scattered light up to the ceiling, the LED pointed a crystal clear light directly at what I wanted and it would not burn me. at headlamp lasted throughout my work in Benin and a six-month motorcycle trip across West Africa afterward. I had been researching LEDs for a while, and thought of creating a streetlighting business to save cities tens of millions of dollars on electricity bills and hours on bulb replacement. LEDs will replace existing lights in the coming decades: and they WorldView 13 Sam Goldman

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007
Contents
President's Note
Lafayette Park
Note to Readers
Commentary
Letter from India
Commentary
Letter from Botswana
Letter from Ha Teboho
Letter from Jumbi Valley
Letter from Mununga
Letter from Medellin
Giving Back
Community News

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

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