THE SOLAR COOKER Newsletter of the Central American Solar Energy Project (CASEP)

Number VII spring 2004

A New Year for CASEP by William Lankford
CASEP President

As the beautiful spring comes to Virginia this year, it feels like a new beginning for me as well. After 30-some years as Professor of Physics at George Mason University, I have retired and moved to Charlottesville to live full time, except of course for the several months I spend in Central America each year. At least there seems to be some progress in centering my life.
The CASEP office is now also centralized in a new addition to a house next door to where I live. The best part of getting the office operating again is that Vinka Craver has joined the effort. Vinka is a native of Chile, has an advanced degree from Spain, and is married to Brandon, a physics graduate student at theUniversity of Virginia. Although only working two days a week, she has already made a huge contribution in revising our web page, including a version in Spanish, setting up a fund raising program, and researching new funding possibilities. With her help, I look forward to providing more support to our Central American partners in the future. The solar oven remains the core of our CASEP work, with ever expanding development in areas that grow out of the experiences that the women have in constructing and using their cookers.
The basic design of the oven has remained the same for well over 10 years, although the basic material for both the inner and the outer boxes is now sheet metal instead of plywood. Unfortunately, we seem to be losing the battle against deforestation as good quality plywood is increasingly hard to find.
The most vexing problem we face in the growth of our program is finding good leadership that can deal with the very complex demands of local cultural understanding and sensitivity, coupled with competence in the world of international funding and project management. In a small organization such as CASEP, it is hard to find all these talents among the women of the project, who often have had neither access to adequate formal education, nor the opportunity to develop their leadership skills.
To address these issues we have initiated a new women’s leadership development program coordinated by Anna Garwood. The goal is to help women who have demonstrated natural ability and interest in leadership to remove the obstacles that have held them back. Anna describes the exciting progress of this program in an article in this newsletter. Some of the continuing programs are described in the following country reports.
As always, we count on the contributions of our generous friends to further this great opportunity to make a difference in the lives of very special Central American women and their families. Their example in overcoming great difficulties provides inspiration for us all.

Women’s Leadership Program
Anna Garwood, Women’s Leadership Program coordinator

After our first year of the Women’s Leadership Program, women from Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica had a lot to say at the second annual “Encuentro” or regional strategic planning retreat in Honduras in January 2004. We came together to evaluate the first year of the program, refocus on our goals, and refine our plans for the expansion of the program for the next year.
As we sketched the goals of the Women’s Leadership Program, a web of ideas emerged. Spreading the awareness of women’s rights is linked to generating the participation of women in personal and public life. This is related to cultivating practical leadership in the current and future programs and preparing women to guide a group. These pragmatic steps formed the foundation for a grander vision of creating a social force of women working toward equality and community development.All of these aims complement the overarching goal of cultivating leadership to ensure the long-term sustainability of the entire organization. Needless to say, we discovered that the process of “forming leaders” touches on so many of the most fundamental parts of women’s lives, from building self-confidence to understanding group dynamics to looking at our role in shaping society.

The building blocks leading toward these goals are
1) a series of workshops that women participate in, and then lead in their community and 2) scholarships for dedicated women to further their education.

Women are chosen, or are elected by their community group, to participate in the program. These women gather in a central location weekly or monthly to participate in a workshop around a certain theme, such as women’s health, community organizing or looking at forms of leadership. Each woman develops the skills of guiding a group by preparing didactic material and then returning to her community to teach a group of women though the same series of related themes. Each workshop builds their confidence and gives them practical experience in leading a group. Additionally, the workshops strengthen the women’s community groups, which sometimes serve as a support network for women facing domestic abuse, sometimes as micro enterprise cooperatives, and sometimes as a group of women ready to push for improved conditions in their community. We have learned that the most powerful thing one can do to build local leadership and create change is simply to bring people together.

In addition to the leadership-building workshops, the program includes scholarships for women who have a track record of positive involvement in the organization and exhibit a spirit of service. Women who receive the scholarships, which are directed at building skills and leadership qualities, then have a commitment to give back to the organization by either formal work or volunteer involvement.

While CASEP has always been motivated by the goal of empowering women, this leadership program takes the commitment to the next level. We have learned that building leadership is not just about getting formal education, it is more fundamentally about the personal process that some women call “despertar”, to become awake.

Visitor’s report From Honduras
Michele Mattioli

The banana trees in the back yard of the CASEP solar oven center are taller, there's a small library now in Orocuina, new cinder block houses replace those destroyed by hurricane Mitch, and there are a health clinic and a little nursery school on the new road from Choluteca. What hasn't changed since my last visit five years ago is that the tap water still isn't potable, the nutrition project in the CASEP center still treats children suffering from malnutrition, and there are still houses made of sticks and mud. The vegetation has yet to regenerate from 50 years ago when the mahogany forests on the hills were stripped, creating a desert and leaving the area vulnerable to the ravages of hurricanes.
But it's the women I've come to see during their week-long meeting of the Women's Leadership Development Program, with representatives from Guatemala and Costa Rica joining their Honduran sisters. Here too some things have changed and some remain the same.
What is familiar is being warmly welcomed and included by a group of confident and friendly women who are hard at work, who laugh a lot, and who are quite serious about learning skills to improve life for their families and communities.
They are adept at sharing their knowledge with each other, honest about the barriers they face, and creative in generating ways to overcome those obstacles. They seem comfortable with the cultural differences of their respective countries. I am intent on remembering their techniques for group process, and inspired by how they integrate music, art and drama into their work. We in the U. S. who are working to improve our communities have a lot to learn from these Central American women.
New this year are the particular women's leadership development activities. It's impressive to see how seamlessly the program has been integrated with the work that began with building solar ovens and has expanded to include nutrition, school scholarships, soy processing, libraries, and literacy projects.
New women leaders are emerging and deepening the strength of all the CASEP work. It was a privilege and a pleasure to be present during the time when the women came together to celebrate their accomplishments and make plans for another year of work in their communities.

Guatemala Report
Laura Koch, program coordinator

Laura sends this recent report on our program in Guatemala. This is an example of the wonderful things that are happening through our Central American projects.

Solar Ovens: This March, CASEP-Guatemala finished our first solar oven construction workshop of the year in Monte Gloria, Santo Domingo Suchitepéquez. Monte Gloria is a community along the southern coast of Guatemala made up of 84 internally displaced families who purchased abandoned cotton and cattle plantations in 1993. This group of 14 women built their ovens in 23 days with the help of four CASEP instructors from the neighboring community of Lupita.
During the second week of their workshop, 11 members of Rotary International visited the group in Monte Gloria and experienced what it is like to be a part of an oven construction workshop. The Rotary group, from Port Townsend and East Jefferson, Washington, had a wonderful time getting to know the women, drilling wooden wheels, measuring and sawing boards and playing with the children. This visit was a unique opportunity to unite the group funding the workshop with the project’s beneficiaries.
With the addition of Monte Gloria, CASEP-Guatemala now has a total of 18 communities and 274 solar ovens functioning and active with monthly follow-up. We also currently have four communities that are in a six-month trial period for the solar oven project. This trial period is the first step in determining whether the climate is appropriate for the solar oven and if the group has sufficient interest to proceed.

Leadership: CASEP–Guatemala is excited to announce the newest addition to our office staff, Magdalena Ajcot, who is our new Leadership Program Coordinator. Since beginning in March, Magdalena has been designing the leadership program and planning six workshops for up-and-coming leaders in each of our 18 communities. Magdalena has also been busy exchanging information and coordinating workshops with other national women’s organizations to help strengthen networks here in Guatemala.
Already this spring, two women have attended a national forum on women’s involvement within the new presidential administration. Two other women have attended a two-day training on HIV/AIDS sponsored by TROCAIRE with sessions held by a traveling theater troop that promotes sex education throughout Guatemala. CASEP–Guatemala has also been invited to attend a national and regional school sponsored by SERJUS to train trainers on techniques of popular education beginning in May.
We are fortunate to have support from Heather Asbil, a Canadian intern who will be assisting us through June with the leadership program. Heather has worked with women’s groups throughout Guatemala for the past three years and has a strong background in experiential learning and art. As a team, Magdalena and Heather are working to create a program that is dynamic, participatory and truly caters to the needs and realities of the women in the Asociación Amigas del Sol.

Health: This year, three promoters (one from each of our regions) are attending monthly workshops sponsored by SERJUS in Quetzaltenango, on topics of health and organizational strengthening. With these trainings CASEP-Guatemala hopes to integrate a women’s health program within our organization. This year we are piloting a project to create small natural medicine pharmacies in each of the three regions. Each promoter who is participating in the SERJUS workshops will be responsible for managing and training other women on how to make their own medicines, run small pharmacies and do health outreach in their communities.

Home Gardens: In February, CASEP–Guatemala continued the home garden series with monthly workshops teaching organic gardening and natural medicine. In a recent survey among the 107 women with home gardens, more than 81% are replicating what they have learned in the monthly workshops. Eighty percent (80%) of these women claim to use only organic methods in their gardens. In each region an average of 31 varieties of crops are being harvested, the most common of which are local greens (amaranth, chipilin, and hierba mora), beans, chiles, cucumbers and radishes. This spring, we plan to take several trips with the women to visit other gardens and natural medicine projects throughout Guatemala to exchange experiences, techniques, seeds and information.

Ferrocement Tanks: In 2003 our four instructors constructed 32 4000 liter ferro cement rain water catchment tanks in the community of Lupita with the help of each beneficiary and her family. Last fall the women experimented with several designs for the lid of the tank to insure maximum protection from insects and to reduce contamination. They decided on a cone shaped lid, which increases the capacity of the tanks, and allows for a tight sealing lid that can be removed for periodic cleaning. This spring the women are finishing up the 25 remaining tanks in the costal communities of Conrado de la Cruz and Monseñor Romero.

Environment: This April, CASEP–Guatemala will be finishing the construction of a bamboo structure at the center in Quixayá. We held six half-day workshops to train participants from local NGO’s on the techniques of bamboo construction with assistance from INTECAP. We are using three different species of green bamboo, Guadua, Apus, and Caña de Castilla, each of which have special properties for construction (tensile strength, durability, diameter, etc). Our hope is that the new salon will not only be a beautiful and cool meeting place for our monthly meetings, but will also serve as a demonstration building for other groups and organizations interested in the techniques of bamboo construction. This summer CASEP-Guatemala will be planting close to 1000 plants of bamboo and 500 macadamia nut trees in the communities where we work as part of a project sponsored by TROCAIRE to support Trees with Alternative Uses. In 3 to 4 years, if cared for properly, these trees should be ready to harvest, which means greater access to alternative building materials and highly nutritional nuts. The women in the project are looking forward to future workshops on alternative building techniques, furniture building and bamboo crafts, as well as workshops on processing and utilizing macadamia nuts in local recipes.

Biblioteca Popular la Amistad
(Friendship Public Library)
Familias Unidas-Honduras

The new community library in Orocuina is a project of “Familias Unidas” (United Families). This group of imaginative women has been making and selling soy bean products such as soy milk, ices, flour, and “sausages”, in the CASEP center. With the profits from their business, and using the organizational skills they have developed in our program, they wrote a grant proposal and obtained additional funding to build a public library. “Ayuda en Acción” (Help in Action) a Spanish NGO, provided most of the funding. The women now operate the library and contribute to maintenance costs through the sale of snacks and beverages at the library. The role of CASEP has been that of catalyst and partial funder.
Children come to the library to read and do research required in their school classes. Important book purchases have been made possible by regular contributions from NOVA, a Catholic community in Northern Virginia. Many thanks to Gil Donahue.