Letters

Praise for SBJ from Solar Panel Cooker Inventor

Thank you very much for your letter and the copies of the last issue of SBJ. Congratulations for the Journal which becomes better every time. In particular I have found the lay-out very pleasant. And what a good idea to have used Spanish and other languages. The little "Newsletter of SBC Northwest" is becoming an international journal, the only one, to my knowledge, entirely dedicated to solar cooking. A few years ago, I had suggested to Beverly Blum to change the SBCI name into SCI. Well, now it's done. For the same reasons, maybe SBJ could become SCJ (the Solar Cooking Journal)? As an old American song goes: "Open up your box, and let the Sun shine in!"

Your presentation of my little work is excellent. Thanks for the smoothing up of my English. However I would point out a minor geographical mistake: Paris to be replaced by Lyon.

Also I have been very interested by Barbara Kerr's article, full of practical hints and philosophical ideas. I shall write to her about it. Receive my congratulations and best wishes.

Roger Bernard
Caluire, France

Solar cooking meshes with traditional cooking

At our Head Start Health Fair we customarily have a solar cooking demonstration and there is also someone handling a food concession. This year we combined both. Since I do not have any experience as a vendor, I offered only to support the people using the propane grill and together we would try to see how propane and solar could interface. We did not have a clear plan other than in whatever way I could manage, I would use the solar cookers to backup their work. At 9 a.m. I put a dozen hot dogs into my SBC; they started heating. No one was ready to eat that early. While my solar franks were soon comfortably hot and holding, the grilled franks were becoming overbrown and shrivelled. We popped the grilled franks into a SBC and launched our first intertechnology vending venture. The grilled franks tasted very good after lengthy holding in the SBC, but the compressed, grilled hamburger was unpleasantly tough. That defined the choices this time.

They grilled franks in batches and gradually sold them off out of the SBC. The hamburgers continued to be cooked on the propane and were grilled individually as they were ordered. And so, solar cookers were successfully integrated into one of our standard community activities.

Most important to me was the gradually shifting of "ownership" of the solar equipment to the vendors. At first they left it completely to me to open the SBCs and remove the franks. However, I had to leave often to tend a literature table and they soon became comfortable opening the SBCs and serving out of them.

Before the day was well begun, not only were the vendors completely sold on using SBCs as backup and holding equipment, members of the community who regularly hold barbecues, cook-outs, dutch oven meals and camp meals, became more interested than at any time in the past 10 years of exposure to solar cooking here. They could see how to handle their traditional foods easier by using a solar oven in conjunction with their standard ways.

Barbara Kerr
Taylor, Arizona USA

Solar panel cooker gives boost to Girl Guides

Girl Guides of Tanzania, discouraged by the difficulty of securing materials to build solar box cookers, now have a renewed enthusiasm brought about by the advent of the solar panel cooker [see SBJ #16]. Oven bags and foil are on their way to enable the Guides to do in-depth trials, and use this technology to help the thousands of Rwandan refugees pouring into their country.

Under the guidance of Anne Toft, a Danish Girl Guide who participated last summer in solar cooking workshops I gave in Denmark, the Girl Scouts of Nepal are undertaking workshops of their own to help the people of this poor, mostly deforested country adopt solar cooking. Anne was selected for participation in a sort of Danish Peace Corps, which sends young people to Third World countries to help in community development projects. Anne chose solar cooking as the project she felt most important. Fortunately, the Girl Scouts agreed with her, and the work is underway.

The Girl Guides of Kenya have provided the chairman for a coordinating committee of several Kenyan organizations working with SCI to establish a solar cooking center in Africa. Wamuyu Wachira got her start in solar cooking when she helped me make a box during a Guide/Scout conference in Nairobi in 1992. This conference was also the start for a number of Boy Scout/Girl Guide projects around Africa, most of which are speeding up because of the new cooker model. Boxes, foil and glass are not plentiful in most of Africa, and the panel cooker reduces enormously the need for these materials. Thank you, Roger Bernard and Barbara Kerr!

Barby Pullium
El Dorado Hills, California USA

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