Chad/Darfur

Avalon Press, a publisher in the UK, is supporting our campaign to build a refugee camp library for 20,000-30,000 Darfuris by donating for every order they receive for Larry Kuechlin's book of poetry, "Along a Ruined Sea." For orders made directly through their website through February 6, Avalon Press will donate two bricks to help build the library, one in the purchaser's name and a matching brick from themselves. For poetry lovers, this could be a great opportunity to help some of the world's neediest readers. Click here to order directly from Avalon Press, or here to read more about "Along a Ruined Sea." Thanks, Avalon Press, for helping us build a library for refugees!

About 2,000 Darfuris are now enrolled in refugee-organized English classes in three refugee camps in eastern Chad, nearly double the number from a year ago. The classes have grown dramatically, from an initial 400, since we started supporting the refugees with Headway ESL textbooks from Oxford University Press. See video from the classes below and learn about our plans to expand this highly successful program.

Video below. Our quest for portable, rugged, solar-rechargeable lighting for refugee camp and village classrooms in Chad is down to a two-light showdown. The two contenders are 1) a new lighting system designed in partnership with electronics manufacturer AltusLumen and 2) the winner of our prior field tests of off-the-shelf equipment, the SOLUX-LED-50.

Watch videos below. To help demonstrate the impact our donors are having, and to show what is really happening in education in the refugee camps in eastern Chad, we sent a Flip camcorder and memory stick to our field partner CORD. The many videos that came back far exceed our expectations, and we'll be sharing them gradually over the next several weeks.

If you donated to provide English textbooks for refugee-organized English classes in eastern Chad, or if you are considering supporting the English classes, here is a photo you should see. Taken in May 2009, it shows several hundred of the English students from Bredjing Refugee Camp. These are some of the Darfuris we are directly helping.

Our recent shipment of 1,750 pairs of reading glasses to Darfur refugee camps and villages in eastern Chad also included a variety of solar lights and bilingual English/Arabic and French/Arabic dictionaries – all tools needed to support reading. Below are photos showing the arrival of this aid and some of the Darfuris who will play a critical role in integrating it into the camps' educational system. For a detailed discussion of the ongoing field testing of the solar lights, with videos, click here.

Field tests in eastern Chad are under way to determine the best solar lighting solution for schools and outdoors literacy classes in refugee camps and villages there. This page will be an ongoing summary of results, which we are sharing not only with supporters of our project, but for the benefit of other aid organizations. We have found very little public literature comparing lights that meet our needs: ultra-portable, rugged, wide-beam for group reading, inexpensive, easy to use and maintain.