Miami Country Day School Announces Solar Cooking Effort for Senegal

	Water Issues: (Solar Ovens Easily Pasteurize Water) 2.4 billion people do not have water sanitation. 1 billion people do not have access to clean, fresh water. 4 billion people live without wastewater disposal. Diarrhea resulting from poor sanitation and hygiene is responsible for more than 2 million children’s deaths per year. More than 30,000 children die each day from preventable diseases like diarrhea, respiratory infections and malaria. Intestinal worms (which cause diarrhea) and diseases like E.Coli, Trichinosis, Salmonella, Cholera and Hepatitis A can be destroyed in a solar cooker.
Background Facts We promote solar cooking for environmental and humanitarian reasons. Please browse the following facts to get a glimpse of why solar cooking can save millions of lives as it improves Earth’s fragile environment.		Fuel Issues: Over two billion households depend on wood for cooking and heating fuel. 63% of all wood harvested is used for fuel. Many developing countries are facing deforestation, an environmental crisis. The open fires used in half the world’s households create unhealthy bio-mass smoke-filled atmospheres leading to acute respiratory infections, pneumonia, tuberculosis and cancer.
	Hunger Issues: (In developing countries up to 70% of a family income can be spent on fuel for cooking…Solar energy is free) More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished. 6 million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger. 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day. (Solar energy is free!)

Miami Country Day School students are proud to announce a new solar cooking effort they are facilitating for Dakar, Senegal. The program will be modeled after the award winning comprehensive solar cooking project currently underway in Lambert, Haiti

The project was kicked off by enthusiastic fifth grade students on May 26, 2004. Under the direction of teachers Marla Friedman, Jill Kriess, Shad Roach and Ron Totarsky, the students held a fundraising sale by selling items they had made from recycled materials. The environmentally attuned entrepreneurs raised $900 in one hour as they displayed and sold their creative wares.

Please watch for upcoming announcements about this project. A formal project announcement will be made at the 2004 IEARN conference in Kosice, Slovakia. At this point, schools from 109 countries will be invited to help make this project a success. The goal is to raise $60,000 to fund setting up the working model program to be viewed at the 2004 IEARN conference in Dakar. We thank Sun Ovens Co. for its support and look forward to spearheading this effort to help improve the environment and improve so many lives.

For more information, please contact the project facilitator,
Rowena Gerber, gerberr@miamicountryday.org,
or technology director, Alice Key, keya@miamicountryday.org

Our partnering school in Senegal Martin Luther King Girls School in Dakar

Miami Country Day fifth grade classes 2004