Perspective

[muck_a_luck]

So. On the way home last night NPR had an item about a couple in India who had moved to live in a rural village. I didn't hear the beginning, but it sounded like they were probably urban and educated and wanted to retreat from the horrors of modern life for a peaceful village. The woman was talking about how much more peaceful life got when you had nothing electronic around you, basically.

So they have built a windmill for this village with a solar backup for power generation. They have a battery bank charging using the windmill and the solar, and the villagers come trade in their batteries every three days or so.

Let me say, as a camp counselor, I lived under these conditions, sort of. We had a car battery for the cabin that ran our electric lights at night. It got charged up every two weeks, and did a decent job of lighting a 20x30 or so space.

Moving on.

They have also built a large solar oven and are building more. On a sunny day they can cook a meal of rice, bread and daal for about 20 using the oven they built.

Here's where the perspective comes in. I mean, intellectually, I know that this is the state of the world. That my culture is like an alien civilization to villages like this, and villages like this are were one-fifth of the people in the world live, if not more. Heck, one-fifth of the people in the world probably have an even more primative existance than the people of this village, because one-fifth of the people in the world are at risk of starvation or starving, and this village seemed to be pretty set for cattle and food. They were just too poor to be on the grid, and the grid is so unreliable for them, even if they could afford to pay for power, they have power outages they can't control that last 6-7 days at a time because their access to power is so unreliable.

The perspective.

The couple who came to the village, describing what they are doing, said that they were trying to help develop and teach technologies that people could easily build and maintain themselves, so that they would not be the victims of forces they could not control. This village now has a reliable source of power for light at night for the first time ever. The farmers are pretty excited about it. They can afford it, they can maintain it themselves, they may be able to add more over time.

This, said the man, is Power. These people now control resources they could not control before. They are taking Power from the center and directing it to their own goals, not dependent on others anymore.

And there's the perspective.

That there are places in the world where people are so poor and so powerless, that a couple of car batteries that they can wind/solar charge essentially for free, is Power.

Not informaton. Not access to the web. Not even a micro-loan, though I suppose a micro-loan could go a long way in this cause. Power, with an uppercase P is a car battery that can give you reliable light on a dark night. In some ways, the first luxury (ETA: see my American nature showing. I'm sure this is NOT the first luxury. But certainly A luxury). That they can do things at night instead of sleep.

Of course, the thing I have been thinking is, whether the guy is right. Is this really Power? This village has gained this thing without governmental help and can have this thing without relying on outsiders. Maybe it is not Power, but a step towards Freedom? But what does that mean in that context? I have no clue what the context even is. That's how remote I am from this place.

I did First World Power, not developing world Power. I hardly know how to even think about the Power of a wind charged car battery inside a mud and dung hut.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for posting this. It really makes us confront, when we start thinking about things like this, how much luxury we are surrounded by, how we take our complex and interdependent civilization for granted. We're living like kings here in America. And most of the time we don't even realize it.

I don't have anything profound to say about power; I'll have to think about that. But it's true that in a very complex, division of labor, everyone's a specialist and we use money to buy what we want -- in a big complicated place like the USA we take for granted how much we are at the mercy of giant institutions like the water company or the electric company, or the people who sell us gasoline, and it all works so well 98 percent of the time that we just accept it. We don't notice it any more.

Thanks for the thinky.

[muck_a_luck]

It does make me think a little bit selfishly about what *I* could do with my resources to un-link myself a little bit...

[green_grrl]

From the people I know who do solar installs in the developing world, the very first thing that happens is education--once they can have light past sunset, the children learn to read in the evening after the day's chores. And Knowledge is Power, so yeah. (Well, and the other thing that happens when solar ovens go in is that women's health and life expectancy go way up from not standing over smoky fires.) It's a fabulous, fabulous thing. So simple by our standards, and a world of difference by theirs.

[muck_a_luck]

There's some context for me! That makes total sense on the education and I would not have even thought that about cook fires, but it's sort of an Of course! thing. Plus I'm sure the solar ovens take some sort of pressure off the group, probably the women and children, to come up with cooking fuel, though I suspect this village, since it can build with dung, can also cook with it. Though you gotta wonder how healthy THAT is. In any case probably not only a reduction in time spent in smoke, but an additional manual labor savings, yielding time that can be spent on something else.

[green_grrl]

Oh, yes, the fuel! I ate at an all-solar restaurant in Chile, in an area that was very arid and desert-like. I can't imagine where the fuel would have come from otherwise--trucked in fossil fuel I guess. Delicious AND very groovy!

Solar Cookers International does great work with villages and with refugee camps--the other great thing about small, portable cookers is they can pasteurize water. (And in refugee camps, women going off to collect fuel are at greater risk of rape. /o\)
http://www.solarcookers.org/programs/intlprogdev.html
http://www.solarcookers.org/programs/humanassist.html

[zats_clear]

I read this a few days ago when you posted it and it has been playing at the edge of my mind since then. Food for thought, certainly!

Power? Freedom? Independence would be another word for it.

Tell more about First World Power...was this a class you took? Am I misunderstanding that bit?