lluggg396

Aga Khan Trust for Culture

Aga Khan Trust for Culture

(The solar hot water system on Am Hussein roof that he is now being forced to remove because the look of it offend privileged visitors to Al Azhar Park who supposedly want to look down from their www.wholesalecheapseahawksjerseys.com expensive meals in the park and see the roofs of the community restored to the way they looked 700 years ago)

(Am Hussein daughter and grandson demonstrate the way their family has been heating its water for the past 70 years, before they built their solar hot water system last month on a kerosene stove in the dark narrow stairwell, to avoid inhaling the toxic smoke and in an attempt to protect the children from getting burned. Now they must go back to this dangerous system because some park planners object to their solar roof.)

This is hardly Darfur, but the recent controversy in Cairo over the US AID Solar Roofs project is worthy of attention as yet another, albeit lowgrade, African tragedy in the making.

(Of course it could get much worse if Egypt, at a fork in the road between pursuing large scale solar projects such as the 20 MW solar thermal plant being built in Kuraymat, and pursuing the government recent announcement to counter Iran move by pressing for their own nuclear power program, chooses the latter. Far from merely having the of warm water leaks to deal with, Cairo will have to deal with Chernobyllike leaks of radiation (especially in a country where entire buildings collapse with alarming frequency because of inferior materials, workmanship and code inspections) and the possibility of terrorist appropriation of nuclear material!).

It appears that the Cairo urban solar roofs project in Darb Al Ahmar is stalled and under threat.

And there is something you can do about it by making your voice heard!

The issue at hand is the attempt by a group of obviously moneyed stakeholders who purport to align themselves with the Eskan Population Section (probably acting on advice of foreign consultants) to block the building of solar hot water collectors on the roofs of houses in Darb Al Ahmar along the Ayyubid Wall, stating that they are good looking beside the garden and will somehow the view from Al Azhar Park is what was told to Solar CITIES green collar trainers Hanna Fathy and Mahmoud Dardir and their team of Solar technicians when they tried to continue the US AID funded project in Darb Al Ahmar!

The official excuse given out to the media, of course (sadly reported and distorted at the conclusion of the recent National Public Radio piece on the project) is that the locally made solar hot water systems are as yet and leak and that by halting the creation of more solar roofs officials can buy time to out the kinks and problems before disseminating solar energy further. They claim that otherwise residents will be to accept solar energy, as though the people whom we have arranged to work with on the first 15 experimental systems (who must currently boil water on the stove with danger to life and limb) are reluctant to receive a free solar hot water system and training in its construction and use, especially with the guarentee we given that we will maintain it, if they aren satisfied we will remove it at our expense. The whole point of the program was that the first 15 systems would be systems and the residents know that. By stopping production of the remaining experimental systems you actually stop any ability to problems and simply shut down the initiative altogether. Thus, in claiming they are committed to the project but halting it to help build acceptance, the officials are in fact eroding confidence in the project and breeding more reluctance (in a patronclient state like Egypt the attitude can often be the officials don sanction it, or have put a temporary stop to it, there must be something wrong with it)!

The notion that the systems our team builds might somehow work was unfelicitously reinforced by a satement that I was recorded making when we were dealing with a minor float valve/ flow rate issue www.wholesalecheap49ersjerseys.com on Am Hussein system (the float valve was 5 cm too high, meaning that it stopped hot water flow to the house after a few minutes of use because the discharge rate was greater than the inflow rate. It was a truly minor problem that was easily corrected). NPR recorded me saying that we faced challenges building systems because there is no in the materials we buy in Cairo. I did not mean to say that we hadn or couldn surmount every challenge! It was true that in the development phase of our project a year and a half ago we had two minor incidents of leaking tanks that actually helped us come up with the pioneering and innovative idea of using Zahran float valves and plastic tank nipples. It was useful because the entire community uses blue plastic tanks for cold water storage and face the same leakage problems (which doesn stop them from using them!). By incorporating these same local tanks into our solar systems we came up with an innovation (using local inventor Magdy Zahran special plastic parts instead of the standard rust prone metal parts) that solved the leaking problem for everybody, solar and non solar users alike!

Furthermore, since that time way back then, before we were even awarded the US AID grant for dissemination, there have been NO leaks. But THE FACTS have historically never stopped people from finding ways to attack discredit or stall the solar industry! So Cairo is just going through the same battle we wen through in California in the 1970s and 80s, when similar issues were raised against solar heating that halted implementation for a good twenty years!

The for more testing excuse is of course contradicted by the fantastic success of the same program in Manshiyat Nasser, where 10 wellfunctioning systems are currently in operation, and more are being built every day, increasing the capacity, understanding and www.wholesalecheapsteelersjerseys.com acceptance of the whole community, and in Darb Al Ahmar itself, where the 3 systems we did install have been working well consistently, one of them for over a year.

Furthermore, stopping the solar builders from coming in and building more units stops any further testing and completely defies logic, since the only people who would be able to work out any kinks, if there still were any, are these same green collar Solar CITIES workers themselves, since nobody else works on solar hot water systems in the area or even cares to go and inspect them!

But the Solar CITIES team are being told not to do any more work, not even to go around any possible problems and the halt in building and possible experimentation thus puts them out of a job. Are they expected to sit at home and wait to see if they get a call saying a pipe is leaking before resuming their work? Or would you think they could better keep on top of things by working with the community on a daily basis to build a larger experience base?

The official and see excuse would also not explain why there is pressure for the residents along the wall who have perfectly well functioning solar systems to remove them!

It seems the nascent Egyptian program in increasing the number of green jobs is having the same growth pains other countries went through when our Zeitgeist still favored the status quo. Aesthetics and perception, and the desire to Disneyfy Darb Al Ahmar, I argue, are more to blame for this controversy over solar roofs.

But we CAN accelerate Egypt transition to a green economy if we pull together on this and make our voices heard.

Background and Importance of the Project:

Al Azhar Park, as some of you know, is the first space built in Cairo in over a hundred years. Until 5 years ago it was a massive garbage dump, an eysore and a health hazard to the communities surrounding it. Today, thanks to the magnificent planners and architects of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, it is a glorious botanical garden filled with fountains, lakes, waterfalls and meandering streams that hosts 3 beautiful fine restaurants. It has also been the host to several World Environment Day festivals.

At the base of the park is the newly restored ancient Ayyubid Wall, and behind that are the recently renovated homes of the urban poor who have put their faith, trust and confidence in the Aga Khan Trust for www.velvetbunnys.co.uk/available-animals Culture to help them improve their environment and their lives.

Most of the rooftops on the dwellings in this part of historic Cairo are now covered with garbage and broken furniture and create quite an eyesore, but on the roofs of the renovated houses the marvelous local Environmental NGO have started building rooftop gardens and solar hot water systems.

(This expensive hitech professional tube solar hot water heater, purchased from RSD technologies by the Environmental NGO El Shabab and donated as a gift to the AKTC restoration project, serves three families near the ancient Ayubbid Wall. It is also visible from the park and was intended as part of an awareness campaign for the potential of solar power in urban Cairo. Because there is often no water in the community, it requires an elevated cold water storage tank. We call this a form of architectural imperialism.

When Liane Hansen from National Public Radio came out to do an NPR special on Change and Cairo (airing this Sunday) the team was treated to a visit to one particular roof, that of local carpenter Am Hussein, who was born in and has occupied his building along the Ayyubid wall for 70 years. He was one of the first of those who had paid their 30% of the cost of renovating their ancient homes (the AKTC takes care of the other 70%) to actively request an experimental homemade solar hot water system built by the Roh El Shabab Solar CITIES team using the US AID small infrastructure funds. And he was proud to show it to the foreign www.wholesalecheapbroncosjerseys.com visitors, who were equally delighted to come up on his roof see it in operation, and glad to know others who couldn find the time to come into the ancient residential area could still see it in all its glory from the park.

Up until last month, when the It Yourself Solar Hot Water System was built and installed, Am Hussein and his family had been forced by economic circumstances to heat their water on a a traditional brass kerosene pump stove They had to light the stove and do their water heating in the narrow stairwell, because the stove gives off massive quantities of hazardous black smoke that fills the house and blackens ceilings and walls and the lungs of the children.

(Am Hussein curious grandchildren approach the smokey fire while their mother runs in the house to get a water can to heat to prepare their baths an all too typical dangerous moment in the daily life of the urban poor)

The use of these stoves not only makes it impossible to keep paint on the walls (because of the layers of soot they create) but, according to an Ain Shams Hospital report in , caused over 300 burns to children and an average of 13 children deaths over a 20 month period in their hospital alone. 56.7% of the children were victims of scalds from hot water and 38.6% of were victims of open flames, as shown in the pictures above.

These statistics, reported from Badawy and Mabrouk (1999) are reproduced below, and are particularly relevant to the Solar CITIES study, which showed that out of 463 families, 212, or 55.8% (66% of 232 Zabaleen families, and the 25.6% of 231 Darb Al Ahmar families), must heat their water on some kind of stove because they are unable to afford rising electricity and gas costs.

47.4% and 19.9%, respectively, heat their bath water in the kitchen, and, because many of the stoves are portable, many actually heat their water in the living room, or, as in the case of Am Hussein family depicted above, on the stairwell! These, then become additional sites of accidents.

( place of accident was the home in 223 cases. In 140 cases one of the parents or a guardian was present at the time. The kitchen was the commonest room followed by the bathroom especially in patients who lived in slum areas where water supply systems are deficient and kerosene stoves are used to boil water.

The topic the article
http://www.dryeyesummit.org/forum-topic/nominee-pet-lookalik
http://www.kljb-oberharmersbach.de/node/7892
http://www.gametable.eu/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=56007