The real story of unlimited growth

This has to be the best short film - animation - about the state of the world today; it summarises decades of study and observation of the state of our world's reliance on fossil fuels with incredibly dense 30 minutes of information about everything we all should know about our reliance on oil, gas and many other non-renewable resources.  It takes on the problem of our current economic model and the debunks whole idea that economic "growth" based on debt, increased energy use and industrialisation is sustainable or is the solution to poverty anywhere.

It also takes on the extremely relevant issue of energy return on energy invested (EROEI) which can't be ignored (early oil fields delivered 100 units of energy for every one invested, today we're closer to 1 to 10. Tar sands in Canada offer far less, ethanol from corn closer to 1 to 1, or less.  And so on).  In Pakistan (which is facing a massive energy crisis at the moment) they're talking about a new massive coal field in the Tharr desert (SE Sindh) which could power the nation, but would require the construction of a massive canal to divert Indus river water to "clean" the coal.  Even without the environmental issues of using this coal, folk have to look at the EROEI of this scheme, which just couldn't make sense.

Another terrifying issue is that of food - how many people know that the vast majority of food is grown with oil and gas inputs? That lands now denuded would be unproductive for years without these "magic" substances? How vulnerable have we made ourselves? How sustainable is this? And, critically, what are we going to do about it? How much more proof do we need to urge us into some radical preventative action?  How much of our aid and international development efforts reinforce existing, destructive and unsustainable conventional agriculture?

Anyone working on building community resilience needs to watch this film and think about how their project builds people's resilience to these very real threats.

In fact everyone needs to take 30 minutes out to watch this film.

But I'd also like to hear from anyone who disputes the thesis put forward by this film.  I would like to see or hear evidence that disputes these points.

Thanks to Mandy Meikle in Scotland for sending this round! 

Progress on our house this week - Feb 2012

Another busy week. Loads happened. Updates one at a time then folks.

So,  João our stonemason, finishes fixing up the outside walls, a week or so after tearing half of them down so we could get drain pipes out, that one day will be linked to our guttering.  As the ground around the house was filled with holes anyway we just dug them all a bit deeper. It became a bomb site in a few hours.  An old fig tree that had grown into the very wall and never actually produced edible figs had to go, and with it went a few meters of wall. Its roots were huge and extended right down to the road.  Reminded strangely of the kind of hole that tank shells made in fine old walls in Sarajevo, we decided to exploit this opportunity and lay all the pipes and cables that were ever needed to go underground.  Oh, and we dug a massive 3m pit for a grey-water soak away pit (for bath and shower water only).  Few pics as we went along:

Step one: remove that fig.. watch out for that biogas tube ...

pipe chaos

before and after, kind of. Bit to the left remains to be done, when we save up enough pennies..

In the old days by hand and a huge amount of people and time. Now.. mighty claws save all that

lower pipe potential outlet to future village sewerage (maybe for grey water, presuming septic biogas works well, we wouldn't want to send any of that out. I mean WHY?

Joao playing with another way of pointing. It was voted out in the end.. 

Pointing is, in a way, the hardest part (João says). We use hydraulic lime with medium sand and a bit of local earth for colour. It take hours to wash the edges of each stone post-pointing. 

Finishing touches...

Another 50m or so of bearing wall to go:(
Loads of it leaning outwards like this. Bit dodgy, needs to be done, one day.

Peak Oil happened in 2006?

People have been predicting peak oil for years and it's been denied for as many years by the oil industry and most Governments.  This link shows that the International Energy Agency has finally taken a position and stated that it has already happened - in 2006!  Bizarre, I mean why aren't we already feeling rising fuel prices on a monthly basis already?

Anyway, this is a good introduction piece to the whole peak oil issue for anyone new to the theory.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/Articles/International_Energy_Agency_Reports_Peak_Oil_Happened_in_2006/

A biogas digester septic tank for our home

Our biogas digester coming along...
For more photos click

this

The time has come to install our septic tank.  We’ve lived the past 6 months with an outdoor compost toilet and a drain from the shower that goes into the gardens somewhere, but a proper house with flushing loos needs a tank to deal with all that waste. 

What happens to our waste? Sewage – it’s so out of sight as to be out of mind.  It’s only when you are building a house, or working with people displaced by war or disaster that you have to deal with it. 

How this post is going to work (it’s way longer than planned, but hey)

First off I’m going to describe the standard sewerage disposal and treatment systems that we would be expected to use around here, then explain what we are doing and why.  So bear with me.  I want to take you on a short journey, the story of poo.  I think it’s worth talking about because we all have to deal with it, wherever people live, and it’s the cause of countless deaths in poorer countries, billions are invested to deal with it in richer nations, it pollutes our rivers and causes so many problems – and despite all this it can be an incredible resource – for energy production, soil enhancement and reforestation.  

Then I’m going to talk about biogas and show a few examples.  Then talk about the plan and biogas septic tank we’re building outside our house in Portugal. 

If you can’t face all this text and reading you can just skip to the slideshow which is

here (all photos and few wordsJ).

Conventional sewerage treatment

The world over, we treat sewage as a public health hazard, and go to enormous lengths to get rid of it. In richer countries massive sewerage networks are laid, linking each house to a treatment centre, that then deposits “treated” remains into the sea, or rivers.  This systems works, but it costs fortunes to install and assumes a fairly well organised and properly funded agency to maintain it all. 

This is not the case in most of the world, where people have to deal with it in other ways, which usually means open sewers, or houses depositing their waste into their backyard, or into open drains running through the community.  Pretty gross and a undoubtedly a source of water-borne diseases.

We live in a village of about 400 houses where there is no sewerage system, so each house has their own septic tank. These usually consists of a hole in the ground about 3 to 4m deep into which a column of concrete rings are set, with a little gap between each one. When the sewage enters the solids sit at the bottom and the fluids seep away through the gaps between these pipes (which are usually around 1m diameter by the way).  So basically these are soak away pits, probably polluting the local ground-water with faecal chloroforms (something you really want to avoid unless you fancy a bit of dysentery or cholera).  It’s not an issue here in Portugal as people don’t drink groundwater – it mostly comes from piped networks, is treated with chlorine which kills these bugs and anyway, the earth and rock probably filter out most of these bad guys before they get to the water table. Probably… The problem is in places with a shallow water table, but that’s another story.

Most septic tanks have two chambers divided by a wall; as the solids break down (micro-bacteria work their magic on the “solids”) they loose mass and rise to the surface (think of the scum and dirty floaties you see in minging beaches when you’re trying to catch a wave).  Anyway, these bits float to the second tank where an overflow takes away supposedly “clean” water. It’s not really clean, but it’s cleaner than when it went it.  This waste or overflow water can be directed through a reed bed or an area filled with plants to absorb the water and the nutrients that remain in it.  Yes – there ARE nutrients.  Something we generally tend to ignore.  But most systems just redirect this waste water back into a passing river or whatever.  When the solids build up too much (after a few years) a tractor come to “de-sludge” the tank, which it then deposits on nearby fields to fertilise the place.  Gross? Not really, there’s mighty nutrients in there, just like putting cow manure on the fields, but we’re getting to that…

The problem of methane production

As you probably know, sewage stinks, but that’s mostly the acids from urine making the smell – not the methane, which is an odourless gas.  All animal dung, including ours, produce methane as it breaks down – which happens when billions of bacteria feed on the stuff and it is they that produce the methane, not our poo.  All living things give off gas: plants give out oxygen, humans breath out carbon dioxide. These mega-bugs give off methane (and a bit of carbon dioxide too). 

Every septic tank leaks methane: it’s lighter than air and seeps out through soil nice and easy. We don’t know it’s happening because it has no smell.  I guess if you were to look at a community through a gas-sensitive lens (like thermal imaging but for methane) you would see plumes of the stuff heading sky-wards, from every backyard, or sewage treatment plants – at least from those that don’t burn the stuff to cook or to make electricity.

But you’ve probably heard that methane is a fairly potent green-house gas; apparently it’s 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.  Climate scientists are worried about melting permafrost releasing billions of tonnes of methane which will further accelerate global warming.  Well, now there’s 7 billion of us folk on-planet now, how much do we contribute every day or year through our septic tanks?

I looked into this and read a recent study that found that septic tanks provide around 100 kgs of CO₂ equivalent to the atmosphere per person, per year.  Arguably this is negligible, but given there’s so many of us it adds up: let’s take a population of 10m people (that of Portugal, or about 5% of Pakistan).  Using this study we can estimate that this many people produce around 1m tonnes of CO₂ (equivalent) per year, equal to about 100,000 Hummers (fuel-hungry American SUVs).  

Checking against a list of countries’ emissions it’s fairly shocking to learn that this is equivalent to the annual emissions of the Maldives, or Swaziland (or twice that of Liberia).  And that’s only from the methane emissions of 10m people’s poo. Take a population of 1bn (India’s way past this point already) emissions from septic tanks rise to 100m tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year, roughly equal to the annual emissions of Belgium or Iraq. 

Does this mean that all our sewage waste is a major greenhouse gas? It looks like it, but I’d need to do more research to pin down these numbers.  Has anyone else looked into this? If these numbers are right surely people would be applying for carbon credits (i.e. cash) to not emit this methane.  (I wonder if we could use these figures to raise carbon financing to build biogas systems in Pakistan, where I work half of the time helping rebuild after floods).  Anyway, back to the case at hand – biogas and our place.

Biogas – a really cool and viable alternative?

Studying at the CAT a few years ago I came across biogas production, a fairly straightforward system whereby the sewage tank (or septic tank) is airtight (so no liquids or gas escape).  A small pipe is embedded into the top of the tank, which is round and dome shaped, so there are no corners where pressure can cause ruptures.  The gas in this case is a methane – carbon dioxide blend and is flammable: it burns! In smaller systems it’s used for cooking, in large, city-size plants there’s so much more gas it’s used to generate electricity via a gas turbine.  I’ve heard that you can even connect this gas to the intake of a petrol generator to make it run, or compress it and make transport gas.  Or generate hot water for heating, showers or whatever. 

My friend Sarah Kent did loads of research (and her thesis!) on biogas and told me about places in Nepal where for generations people had cut trees for firewood till the place was completely denuded. Unable to survive there any more people were starting to migrate to urban slums.  So they introduced biogas plants, initially working just on animal manure.  These provided enough gas for cooking; combined with reforestation they have been able to deal with the problem in some communities.

Then I met David Fulford, of Kingdom Bioenergy, a former renewable energies professor at Reading (UK) and for many years the biogas consultant for AshdenAwards. He worked in Nepal for years, introducing biogas design – and now there are over 900,000 of small family or community sized plants working there.

I asked if he had a design we could use for human waste – in fact can it work on our sewage? Given that most of the plants I’d seen worked with animal manure only.  He saw no reason why not.  But why not add in food waste, he suggested.. And he then pointed me towards this amazing video of a system used in India that works entirely on food waste.

To combine both human and food waste, David suggested we buy an insinkerator (a kind of blender that fits below sinks, like in those American horror movies).  This would have to be plumbed into the tank, so thought about well in advance.  David kindly agreed to help us by designing a basic plant (and has since been really helpful on many fronts!).

David also put me in touch with Govinda Devkota, a Nepalese biogas specialist who has built thousands of these plants.  Govinda sent some great technical guidance material which has helped.  (He’s available for consultancies worldwide by the way!). 

On-site fertiliser too!

One of the best “outputs” from a biogas plant is the slurry – which is “delivered” above ground by this system for use as fertiliser and is apparently an incredibly good source of nutrients for trees or gardens.  Our land has fairly acidic, sandy soil, quite low in nutrients so we could really use this.  So could most of the planet as 80% of our agricultural land is now effectively denuded by years of intensive chemical agriculture. 

So in summary:

• Biogas septic tanks (digesters) deal with the problem of pollution to rivers or ground water;
• They provide a form of energy that would deal with environmental problems locally while reducing global emission increases from human-based methane production.
• This energy can be used to provide free, smokeless gas for cooking – freeing people up in so many countries from the horror of fire-smoke, which WHO reports kills over 2m people per year.
• The odourless liquid effluent that biogas tanks deliver could solve the massive food crisis affecting millions in poorer countries – by providing safe and highly effective fertiliser to increase soil fertility, which people can then use to grow more food at home and improve nutrition. 

How our biogas system should work

First off, here’s a picture of the plan David kindly drew up for us. 

The design we're using to build our biogas digester. Source - David Fulford, Kingdom Bioenergy

So far this is what I’ve learned:

-         When the sewage in the tank rises to the top of the “digester pit” (see plan) it reaches the bottom of the dome “roof”. At that point all the gas will be collected in the “gas dome”.  As the gas pressure builds up here it will “push down” on the liquid in the tank forcing it to “displace” into the slurry reservoir, (to the right of the plan).   This body of water in the slurry reservoir will then push down on the gas, providing it with about one bar of pressure – forcing it along the pipe and to the place of end use (a biogas cooking ring for example).  As the gas is used up, pressure drops and the liquids will slowly return to finding their level again, until gas builds up again.  Get it?

-         When the quantity of liquids in the tank increases, the slurry reservoir will fill up quicker and eventually reach the top, where there is an outlet.  Here we will connect a pipe and allow it to drain into a small holding tank we’re going to build, where we’ll install a submersible sewage pump.  When this holding tank is nearing full the pump to engage and push the waste material uphill, some 30m away to a bit of land we have where we’ll build yet another tank, where we will add sawdust to help the slurry become more solid and manageable for transporting around.  David told me about some women in India who added worms, which really improved this process making it even better and more compost-like, which they were then able to sell as a great fertiliser. 

-          The temperature in the tank should remain fairly warm to keep the multitudes of friendly bugs happy. This is around 30 degrees C.  Very warm in other words. True, but they do generate their own heat as they work away in their anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment down there.  The problem might be the cold earth in which they are surrounded.  So we might try and insulate the tank, on top at least.  We also plan to put in a heating coil connected to our hot water cylinder so if we every have any “spare” heat we can share a bit of it with our billion-bug generator mates.  I’ve included an electric wire so we can put a thermostat in there too, to keep an eye on temperatures. I’m told that the earth around here stays at around 17 degrees C, so we’ll see how they cope. 

-         We shouldn’t put in too much water into the tank, but too little isn’t good either.  The amount you get from a low-flush toilet is, David thinks, probably fine.  When we wash food waste down the special sink we can do so with warm water, and so decrease the cold shock factor for our little buddies. 

-         We’ll need a dedicated sink for the food waste cutting thing – we shouldn’t flush all our washing up water down there, obviously.  So we’ve found a space near the kitchen where we can have a special sink, but even then I think we should install a two-way valve outside, which we will have to turn manually every time we want to direct waste to the tank.  That way we can still use the sink to wash veg or boots or whatever, and direct that water to the garden or elsewhere.  Complicated? Not really, just another thing to do and it’s not as if we don’t have enough of those!

OK that’s all for now folks. I’ll try and keep posting updates as things progress. 

In honour of Pete Bursnall

Pete

What a shock to learn of the passing of Pete Bursnall, a great guy I’d become friends with over a couple of years, back in ’06 and ’07. We were both students at the CAT in Wales, both in that middle point in life, loads behind us, loads in front; both fanatical about dangerous things in the great outdoors – the difference being that he actually organised his time well so that he could actually do most of them. He’d already written a guide book to mountain-biking an array of Welsh mountains (which he gave me! Seemingly hand bound and printed too).  Then he was off sea-kayaking; I saw a mad picture of him naked on some deserted island god-knows where, his sea-vehicle parked up on a rocky beach.  A moment of bliss was that?  

For a while we seemed to be comparing injuries. He broke his collar-bone or something falling out of his paraglider (or flying into a rock I think it was). I failed to notice a massive hole in the ground while careering down a hillside on a mountainboard, breaking my elbow and wrecking my wrist. He then sprained something serious mountainbiking on the ice while I snapped a little bone in my foot in a pathetically small skatepark in Spain. 

Enough of this he stuff; this letter’s to you Pete, wherever you are.  In fact what’s this you posted on facebook to say you’re “I've gone flying.... Catch you later x” ? When exactly did you get to fit in that last post? Positive till the end.  In fact it was your positive energy that always got me there in Wales.  Always so much to do, to debate and to fix, always an inspiration.  You told me about blogging and persuaded me to get one going, which I did.  In fact truth is I’ve been slacking for the past, er, year or two, but now I’ll definately put more up there again, as you would have harassed me to.  I remember you telling me how you would put the kids to bed and type up your days post, while they lulled to sleep at your tapping.  How you’d started kick-boxing at your kid’s club. Nice one. Again, I’m going to take up on that with my kids too. See: you’re still inspiring us here.  In fact they say someone’s not really gone while their memory remains from those left behind.   

Talking of memory, Monica and I decided to dedicate this years’ tree planting to you. Couldn’t decide which one, so we just went for all of them on a certain terrace, right behind our little bothy we live in for now, on our spit of land in Portugal.  So here’s what you get: a redcurrant, two raspberries, a blueberry and a lemon tree.  Nikita (now 16 with hands like iron, taller than me, quite a craftsman and builder and a flow-master on deep fresh snow. You’d like him). Anyway, he suggested we look at what’s happened to the old part of the compost loo, now 3 and a half years old.  We bust open the wee door Paulo built into the bottom and behold – compost of joy! No smell either.  Bizarre, impossible you might say, amazing we all said.  Anyway, you’ll be thrilled (or horrified) to learn that this power-mix went in with your berries to give them a good head start in life.  Good bit o’ muclh on top and I’ll keep watering them for a few days as we seem to be experiencing a bizarrely late Indian summer over here. 

Yer lemon tree.

Pete's berry terrace

the two raspberries

Thinking of my family I ache when I think of yours, the enormous emptiness that you must have left behind. Words can’t express the pain and torture that they must be experiencing.

As Simon rightly said today, it reminds us of our mortality, the passing of a friend. So true; soon enough we’ll all be there with you. Will we remember? Will we think and feel anything?  Nikita and I were just talking about this the other night: what part of us stays on? Can we bring our memories with us? How painful will that be? Do we participate in some future part of the universe somewhere? Too many questions and unknowns; shouldn’t dwell on it I reckon, just get on with life and make the most of it we can.  Every day, every hour (Nikita says we only have 600,000 hours more or less in life). Given that we sleep through half of those, that leaves about 300,000 hours. Jeez.. what percentage of mine have I burned already? How many have I wasted watching some rubbish on telly or sitting around late at night wasting time… What really matters? Family, friends, adventure, adrenaline, Fun (of course), love (well that kind of comes with the former 5), making a difference on our time here for those less fortunate. I think this is a major one, given that this “here” we’ve landed on is both a heaven and a hell for people, and the vast majority of our earthling cousins seem to have such a hard time of it.  The energy we generate from the 5 things-that-matter should, I think, be used to power ourselves forward to make life a little better out there (or a little less crap, whichever way you see it). 

So this is my own humble send-off to you Pete – in reflection of your amazing life I prepare (in advance) a multi-berry blast to power you on your way – red, blue, yellow, pink and green – all the colours of the fruits from your new berry terrace.  I hope you enjoy them somewhere, somehow…

On bringing sunlight to the darkness

I need to write more.

Every passing week I see a growing pile of months that represent the chunk of my life I've lived in Pakistan I wince at the stream of writings that could have been; horrified by my lack of recounting of stories of the peoples and places, ideas and opportunities, chance meetings, inspiring moments of passion in dance or music, children, community.

They say something about the longest journey, first steps, no time like the present and all that.  So yes, now is the time, and I'll try to write in the moments between multiple events and busyness..

Where to begin?  at this stage i usually get distracted by searching out pictures of recent ventures into the real Pakistan (Islamabad is lovely, but worlds apart from the bustling, noisy, dramatic and heady rest of the land). Not that there is one land, it's like several countries, meshed into one, officially for only 60 years, but really for thousands of years before that in an incredible history that makes our simple dwellings in Scotland a thousand years ago seem like the stone ages compared to what's been transpiring around here.

But today we're here, in the present. I'm still part of a team of advisors and managers of British taxpayers aid money to help flood-affected people rebuild their lives. My first time with DFID the department for international development (and rather an honour at that to be honest). A donor, one of the biggest donors out here, and it's been a pleasure to see how seriously the whole "institution" takes the quality and targetting of our limited aid budget.  How efficiently they handle the information flow to Parliament and the beaurocracy which has allowed us to focus completely on the best, most cost effective and lasting types of emergency aid and, later on, investment into 'early recovery' projects.  Having spent years on the other side of the table, as an operational organisation, asking donors like DFID for money, how we portion it out. How there's no influence or interference from commercial interests - like British companies being favoured for contracts from UK aid cash.  Apparently Clare Short dealt with that sillyness years ago, and it's stuck ever since. British NGOs aren't favoured over any others either.  Furthermore, I don't feel that we're under any pressure to make funding decisions based on UK foreign policy; it really is based on degree of humanitarian need, levels of coverage by other organisations and donors (filling the gaps), finding the most cost-effective solutions, those that also empower recipient communities, maybe even improve the dire nutritional situation, promote women's rights and represenatation, possibly reduce their vulnerability to abuse and attack, things that build community resilience to future disasters, and so on.

There's just so many issues out there, which is partially why I've never decided on what to start writing about. One at a time right? Small steps.

Let's start with a conversation I had with Farrah a couple of days ago.. Farrah runs a local NGO (called CCHD) that's been involved in womens' rights, advocacy and now with UNHCR setting up legal advice centers around the country, in an attempt to offer some level of representation to people who don't have access - to justice, aid, legal aid, advice.  It's such a heavy task. Protection, and the entire legal safety net that we so take for granted in the "West" is shocking by its absence. Only then do I get a glimpse of what it all means.  Where do you start with a case of sexual abuse, if the legal system doesn't have the will or means to deal with it? How can you protect the victim who has told her story?  Especially in an Islamic culture - which has got to be one of the most gentle and justice-oriented religions out there, but there's so many other layers in society, tribal, family honour.

Anyway, Farrah and I talked about solar lights which she's keen to find out more about. I started looking into this last November when tens of thousands of people were still displaced by flood-waters living in spontaneous camps in any available sites, sometimes in more formal camps where the army or the humanitarians could provide decent tents, water supply maybe, some sanitation facilities, deliveries of food.  We'd visit these camps - always during the day. Our security regs are such that we don't get to see these places at night.  Having lived through war and displacement in Monrovia - Liberia - in 2003 I know fine what it's like: very dark. And scary, especially if you're a young girl, surrounded by strangers from other parts of town, or tribes.  With no money and stuff people just don't have the means for light. So you get whole transitional townships which somehow function day and night. And imagine trying to find a quiet moment for a little wash, or when you're bursting for the loo in those long hours of night, and those scary strangers have wickedness on their mind, and, hidden in the cloak of darkness they descend on those most precious and vulnerable among us, causing immeasrable harm and trauma. It's such a nightmare and it's happened in every camp setting I've ever been in from Bosnia to Aceh - and now in Pakistan.  And like most places, authorities would rather deny it's a problem, that it's happening at all, that the good people of these parts would never do such a thing.  But they do, we do. Men that is. There's monsters within us that we battle with and sometimes, stressed and when our social order is thrown upside down by disaster and displacement the monster takes over.

Knowing this, we have to create means for social protection that are specially designed for life in camps and humanitarian chaos. And one of these should surely be light. Imagine the bustle of five thousdand people in a scrap of land beside a wood and a lake, at night where you can hardly see what you're stepping on. Then see another vision of the same place: a village bright with tiny lights, paths illuminated, toilets in carefully chosen areas lit up and watchable, surrounded by rows of eyes disguised as shelters. Even if nobody's watching, the warewolf knows that someone could be... How much much difference would this make? Surely...

So back in November, charged with coming up with a plan for my country's portion of aid money for shelter, I worked with some of the great folk at Concern to expand the provision of emergency shelter kits (2 high quality tarps, 6 long bamboo poles, some warm blankets for the winter season, etc.). I think we were looking at around 35,000 families or so.  At this point I started looking into solar lights and presumed there was some local production facility. There could be, but it's a bit of shambles, and all the panels and lights they produce come from China and they just re-assemble them here.  At around $30 a pop.

Folks in one of hundreds of villages where we worked with
Concern and Rootworks, their local partner, who
are rebuilding houses here, so they can move
out of these tents, a year on after the floods in Aug 2010.

OK so back up a minute - first we decide we need to do something about the problem of scary men/ prowling spectares, and lets say we focus on light.  We agree that if there's any chance to reduce these horrors we should grasp them, we assume, on behalf of the tax-paying population that they agree (hope you're OK with that folks!).  Right, next we have to find a product that's going to last more than a few weeks, that's robust and reliable, simple and easy to use. It should be cheap - so we can buy lots of them. There's plenty of $500 units out there, with batteries and fancy battery boxes and so on, but then we'll only be able to help a few families, and they'll probably end up in the richest man's household.  No, they should be distributed to everyone, one per family.  So price should be low.

As chance would have some samples were dropped off to our offices in London and sent out for sampling. A relatively new company, and product really - a robust panel using thin-film solar technology stuck to a chunky bit of plastic, offering enough of a trickle of current to charge a light that holds 4 LED bulbs.  Pretty meagre light at first, but pressing the button a few times increases the brightness (while also reducing the time they can stay on).  Optional extras include fittings for most mobile phones, batteries, radios and so on.  Cost for the panel, cable and light only? About ten pounds stirling ($15 or so).

Talking to a family in Dadu, about their solar light (toughstuff) and how it had been amazing...

So we shared these with Concern and it turned out they had bought them before - in Haiti. So they bought 12,000 of them and gave them out in Southern Sindh.  Feedback was amazing: they were saving about $3 a month on candles or kerosene and a further $5 on mobile phone charging... They had figured out where to find adapters to fit their mobile phones, which meant they didn't have to pay to go to town to charge them.

OK, so these were distributed long after they had been in camps - they had returned already, so they were "late" in that regard.  But the "return on investment" seemed to be really good - i.e. the investment is paid back within a few months, after which they save money.

To cut a long story short, it has occurred to me that we should include solar lights in all future emergency shelter kits - as long as they are low cost and robust.  The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has been in charge of the emergency shelter sector in Pakistan since Aug 2010. They are some really committed and passionate folks there, and keen on the idea of light, and I'm so pleased to see that this year lights have been included in the shelter cluster's priority list of non-food items.

So, moving forward in time now (this story has taken months to finish) we have funded IOM to provide emergency shelter for 18,000 families (over 100,000 people) in the newly flood affected areas in Southern Sindh.  Each family will get a solar light. This time a different model - from illumination, which sell them at around $7.50 a unit, delivered to Pakistan. That's less than £5 each!

In two weeks I'm going to visit the people that received these lights and am going to find out what they think.  I'll finish or continue with this post then.

Granny, at 92, with one of her tribe of great grandchildren, in a tiny village flattened by water in Jacobabad, Sindh.  Poor, they may be, but look how healthy and positive and alive!

Multan Pottery - Punjab, Pakistan