TIDES Overview Gallery

In reports on the aftermath of the disaster in Myanmar, many of the photos and videos show shadows on the ground, i.e. the sun is still shining.  (I may be the only person on the planet who is looking for shadows in these images).  

If only they knew how, the people of Myanmar (and many other countries) could be cooking and boiling water with the sun whenever it is shining, and saving their meager (and soaked) wood supplies for nights and cloudy days.

These ladies in Bangladesh (see photos below) are not adjusting the signal for their TV sets.  They are cooking meals for their families with a parabolic solar cooker in front of (or on top of) their flooded houses. (They can also pasteurize drinking water with this or any other solar cooker.) Using parabolic cookers like the ones pictured below or the lower, heavier, wind-proof Chinese version, one can boil a pot of water in 20 minutes, fry food or start cooking beans and then transfer them to an insulated heat retention basket where they will finish cooking and stay hot for hours.  

Although the panel solar Cookit I demonstrated to Honduran FEMA officials in April cooks more slowly and at lower temperatures than a parabolic cooker, it is still the cheapest, smallest and easiest to use type of solar cooker.  It has allowed thousands of refugees to cook with their most abundant resource--the sun.  Of course, different locations and cultures require different types of solar cookers (that's why it's great that there are so many varieties, of solar cookers being adapted by local communities all over the world. 

The combined techniques of Solar/integrated cooking would be ideal for places like Myanmar where people have lost everything but still have eight or nine months a year of sunshine.  Travel websites for Myanmar advise tourists that even in the monsoon season there may be morning and afternoon showers but it's generally sunny at midday (time enough to get one or two meals started with a parabolic solar cooker and transfer them to a retained heat cooker).  

Integrated solar cooking is effective in dramatically reducing fuel wood consumption as demonstrated by the successful pilot project in the Iridimi refugee camp in Chad. It allows women to cook up to two meals a day with sunshine and keeps the evening meal (which was solar cooked in the afternoon) piping hot in a retained heat cooker until it is consumed at night.  On most days the only meal that requires a fire is breakfast.

The Regional Wood Energy Development Program in Asia notes that "The main cause of deforestation in Myanmar may, indeed, be cutting and felling for wood fuel."   

As the COPECO (FEMA) and Red Cross officials who ate my solar cooked food during our SOUTHCOM-sponsored exercise in Honduras pointed out in our wrap-up session, large concentrations of refugees, who may be in place for months or years will decimate the forests surrounding their camps in ever widening circles.  

With a combination of solar cookers (panel,  box or parabolic) and heat retention baskets the Myanmar disaster victims could cook much of their food and pasteurize their water using sunlight.  Add efficient cookstoves (the third tranche of the integrated solar cooking method) and these people could use their meager resources for something other than the purchase of fuel.  Also Myanmar's forests would not disappear so rapidly into the cooking fires of its citizens.  

When things settle down these people could be taught to make small family-sized biogas plants that turn human and animal waste into cooking gas.  They would be able to produce all their energy from local renewable sources like the citizens of thissmokeless village in India.

I have heard not one mention of fuel in any news reports on the assistance that will be needed by the people of Myanmar.  Although the assumption appears to be that people can always burn wood if they need to cook, after a disaster like this when everything has been thoroughly soaked, even wood for fuel becomes problematic. 

The latest reports are of widespread outbreaks of diarrhea due to polluted water and the added problem of contamination from salt water, which is undrinkable even when boiled.  Small solar stills can provide clean water from any source.  

There are so many simple and sustainable solutions to these very big problems.  We just have to get them to the people who need them.

Thanks,

Pat