Solar lights to developing countries and to Ukrainian children

Maine Writer: Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Portland Maine and the Rotary Club of Palm Beach, Florida, have been sending solar lamps to the Dominican Republic bateys where the Haitian sugar cane workers and their families live in villages without electricity.

Rotary in the Dominican Republic! Portland Rotarian Roger Fagan, an audiologist, and the club's DR international service group are bringing solar lights to the Bateyes where the Haitian sugar cane workers live. The group are the fantastic Hearing, Hands and H20 international service committee providing hearing aids, prosthetic hands, and water filters to Dominicans and the island nation's Haitian sugar cane towns. Since the COVID pandemic, these lamps have been sent by ship and delivered to a reliable contact in the DR.

Solar lights are a wonderful international humanitarian program:

By Aliyah Frumin published on MSNBC

Flat-pack bulb brings light to disaster zones

In the developing world, access to a reliable source of artificial light is a significant problem. People living without a regular source of energy sometimes use archaic kerosene lamps to bring light and heat to their homes, even though the side effects of inhaling or ingesting kerosene can be devastating.

Alice Min Soo Chun (Founder and CEO SOLIGHT DESIGN Inc. & Founder President)  has been busy packing 1,000 collapsible lanterns into three giant suitcases. 

Shortly after Christmas, she’ll cart them by herself to war-ravaged Ukraine. Her goal is to distribute as many of the portable solar lights she created to as many children in hospitals as she can.

“I want these kids to know that we haven’t forgotten about them and that the world cares about them,” said Chun, the co-founder and CEO of Solight Design. “I want to tell them that the light is basically like holding sun in your hands…and the light of their imagination is even more powerful than the sun – and that they are going to get through this.”

Girls in Nepal with a Solight lantern following 2015, earthquake.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid have left many without power. After Chun spoke to a children’s hospital in Lviv, Ukraine, she said she learned many young patients there were scared and struggling during the rolling blackouts. She also said she learned at one hospital, nurses at one point were cooking for food for infants in the Intensive Care Unit and didn’t have light and power, and were having a difficult time even just boiling water.

Chun, 57, who was honored on Know Your Value and Forbes’ 2022 “50 Over 50,” Impact list, knew she had to help.

The entrepreneur had previously delivered her origami-style “SolarPuffs” to children in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. The lanterns have also been distributed to war-engulfed countries or areas hit by national disasters, including in Nepal, Haiti, Ghana, Liberia and more.

“When we gave our colorful lights [to kids in Puerto Rico], it was easier for them to relax and fall asleep. They used a blue light as a nightlight, which helped them in the evening….So when I heard about the kids in Ukraine, I said ‘I have to go and take these lights to them,’” said Chun.

The lanterns, said Chun, will be paid for by Bob Iger, CEO of The Walt Disney Company. Iger reached out to Chun after his team saw her work featured on “Gutsy,” Apple TV+’s show by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, which spotlights some of the world’s bravest and boldest women.

To get to Ukraine, Chun will fly into Krakow, Poland and then will take a six-hour train to Lviv. She plans on delivering the lanterns to children in three hospitals.

Chun is planning on making a second trip to Ukraine in the spring to deliver an additional 4,000 lanterns.

Chun grew up in South Korea and then upstate New York. As a young girl, her mom taught her origami (the genesis of the SolarPuff), in addition to sewing. 

Always creative and fascinated by design, Chun studied architecture at Penn State, and eventually earned her masters in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

The idea of the SolarPuff came about in 2006 when Chun’s son was diagnosed with asthma. At the time she was living in New York City and learned one in four kids in the Big Apple had asthma due to air pollution. She decided to focus on solar technology while teaching at Columbia University. Three years later, she developed her first inflatable solar light prototype. And in 2015, SoLight Designs was born.

Despite the potential danger of her upcoming trip to Ukraine, Chun said she isn’t afraid.

“I’m a little nervous. But I’m more excited than anything,” she said. “…If I can go and make a difference in this small way, there’s hope for everyone.”

Central American chaos 101: refugees are our responsibility

Unfortunately, American have not asked enough questions about Central America, as though the cluster of countries somehow don't matter or they hardly exist.  But now, with thousands of migrant refugees fleeing, we are forced to understand the enormity of their social and economic hardships.  Yes, America is to blame for a lot of the instability.  Here is one echo opinion to help describe the situation.  Perhaps, it is Americans who have been the enemy. If so, then there is a moral responsibility to help those desperate people who are suffering as a consequence of American imperialism.

An echo opinion editorial published in the Massachusetts Greenfield Recorder by Preston Browning Jr.*

Thousands of immigrants flee violence and terror in Central
America

There is an expression from the African-America community of the 50s and 60s, that I cannot get out of my head: “What goes around comes around.” 

As thousands of immigrants flee violence and terror in Central America, that expression takes on profound contemporary meaning.

Most of my readers may ask ‘Why?’ 

And the answer is quite simple: because our country, the United States, has contributed mightily to creating the conditions that make countries like Honduras and El Salvador virtually unlivable. 

Smedley Butler, described by General Douglas MacArthur as one of the truly great generals in American history, would have understood exactly what that expression meant.

When he retired as commandant of the Marine Corps, he wrote about how he had spent most of his 33 years in the Corps: he had been, he wrote, “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” serving, as “a racketeer for capitalism.” And now the searing confession of an honest man: along with hundreds of other Marines, he had taken part in “the rape of five Central American republics.”

So there could be no mistaking his intent, Butler grounded his claims in precise commercial details: “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1919. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903.” Al Capone, Butler wrote, thought he was hot stuff because he had three U.S. counties where he and his gang of thugs held sway, whereas this U.S. Marine Corps general and his men were free to prepare the way for the ravishing of whole countries.

The American public has almost no knowledge of our country’s role in turning the countries of Central America into what might be called “plantation dependencies,” states theoretically independent but actually little more than colonies. And whenever one of them has achieved real independence, it is only a matter of time before Washington turns loose the C.I.A., with the result that, in the case of Guatemala, for example, a civil war follows and a ruthless military government proceeds to undertake wholesale slaughter of its citizens.

This picture is not a pretty one. According to Stephen Shalom, author of “Imperial Alibis”: “In 1954, the United States overthrew the elected government of Guatemala and organized a brutal security apparatus to maintain the status quo. Over the next three and a half decades, the U.S.-backed security force was responsible for as many as 200,000 killings, with the help of intelligence files set up by the C.I.A.”

Today, such countries as Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala still suffer from this history of oppression and violence. 

Several years ago in Honduras a group of right wing crooks overthrew a democratically elected government; President Obama allowed his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, to recognize the new government as legitimate. Throughout Central America, jobs are scarce and educational opportunities often lacking. It is small wonder that thousands of men and women, even children, head north in search of a new home relatively free of grinding poverty, oppression and violence.

Donald Trump claims that a wall is required on our southern border to prevent rapists and drug dealers from entering the U.S. illegally. But he ignores the facts: most of the cocaine and other drugs are smuggled in through authorized entry facilities, and there is no statistical evidence that emigrants from south of the border are more given to sex crimes than are U.S. citizens. The vast majority of those attempting to cross over from Mexico are our brothers and sisters, far more products of our history than most of us can possibly imagine.

(MaineWriter- Americans owe a humanitarian response to the desperate Central American migrant refugees.)

*Preston Browning Jr. is director
of Wellspring House Retreat in Ashfield and Associate Professor Emeritus of English at the
University of Illinois at Chicago.