Iraq power woes short-circuit Olympics viewing

The money you sponsor will bring light into 4000 homes in villages around Karbala who currently have no access to electricity. The lighting of their homes will enable the family to be safer in the dark, avoid inhalation of diesel fumes indoors, burns due to naked flames and allow children to study after dark. Through Lady Fatemah Trust (a UK based charity who take 0% commission) all your donations will go directly to funding this project:

£150 helps in fabrication and maintenance of one solar lantern in a poor rural household – that’s just £2 per kilometre of the walk.

£300 pays for the installation and maintenance of one fixed solar lighting unit in a rural non-electrified household – that’s just £4 per kilometre of the walk.

£600 trains 4 people to install and maintain solar panels for households in 6 months – that’s just £8 per kilometre of the walk.

In December of 2012 by the grace of God, a group of individuals from different parts of the world will unite to complete an 80km walk through war-torn Iraq from the holy city of Najaf to the land of Karbala. They shall walk for three days during the daytime with the scorching dessert sun bearing down upon them and they will rest in the evenings in makeshift tents, when the blistering cold takes over as temperatures rapidly plummet.

“If someone sleeps hungry it is because another person has deprived him a share of his wealth.”

The grandson of the last messenger of God Hussain ibn Ali, refused to bow to tyranny, (a virtue that is so apt today given the global uprisings we have recently witnessed) and was martyred along with 72 members of his family in a dessert land, having been deprived of water for three days. Since then, a walk from Najaf to Karbala (the land where he was slain) is customarily undertaken by millions of people annually (40 days after the day of his death) to commemorate his great sacrifice.

Updated on Oct 26th 2012

Many families, unable to afford the commercially available, relatively safe paraffin lamps, are reduced to improvise by placing a makeshift wick in a plastic bottle filled with paraffin. These devices produce only a very limited amount of light while they are dangerous as they exude harmful fumes and may cause fires. There is very little that the families can do in the 10-12 hours of darkness each day and even simple tasks like caring for their livestock or going to the toilet after dark are a challenge and can even be dangerous.

As always, the poorest families are those who suffer most. Imagine the life of Um Ali, a widow who needs to provide for seven orphans. Her financial resources are extremely limited and she cannot afford to buy a paraffin lamp. Although she knows that the bottle device is dangerous and harms her and her children’s health, she is forced to make use of it. Her children need to work after school so that the family can eat. With the bottle lamp, it is very difficult to study and prepare school assignments after dark. Um Ali’s children are weak students and will probably not get very far with their education. Um Ali cannot afford to buy a kerosene cooker or kerosene either. She cooks on an open fire and spends hours every day collecting firewood.

The vicious circle of lack of skills and education leading to poverty and poverty leading to fewer opportunities, dependence on hand-outs and lifelong hopelessness is enveloping her and her children. With its solar lighting and cooking projects, LFT intends to solve the problems at hand while at the same time empowering women like Um Ali.

Um Ali never went to school and is unable to read and write. However, LFT, together with a partner organization in India, will train her and widows like her to install solar panels on the roofs of houses. These panels charge solar lamps that emit sixty times the light a paraffin lamp emits without harmful fumes and without danger of fires. Once installed the lamps have no running cost. During the average life time of the panels, 25 years, families will only need to occasionally replace their solar lamps.

This project has been conceived 30 years ago in India and has since been successfully implemented in 29 poor countries all over the world. Partnering with the Indian initiator, LFT will soon be sending three Iraqi widows, two of them already grandmothers and none of them literate, to attend a six-months training course in the science of installation and maintenance of solar panels for domestic use in India.

The widows will return to assemble and install solar panels on houses in their villages. While the project intends to provide solar panels and lamps free of charge to about 600 vulnerable families, recipients will be asked to contribute according to their financial ability. Contributions from beneficiaries will be used to purchase more solar panels. The widows will gain a small but adequate income. Instead of being a burden on their communities and live on hand-outs, they will have become skilled, productive community members. Children will be able to study at night and their school performance will improve. Experience in other countries, notably Jordan, shows that night-time colleges and skills training courses will soon mushroom in these communities to accommodate the needs of their members, further improving the level of education and economic abilities of community members.