[TASC Luncheon] Food, Water, Solar Energy and Learning in the Mountains of Haiti

[Robert Kirby]

At Café Baklava Mediterranean Grill, 341 Castro Street, Mountain View

Tuesday January 14th, 11:45 AM

More info: Bob Kirby  (650) 417-5740

RSVP to robert...@gmail.com

Randy Mont-Reynaud and Eric E. Sabelman

January 14

Food, Water, Solar Energy and Learning in the Mountains of Haiti

 

Anthropologist Randy Mont-Reynaud, PhD., has been conducting research and service work with a team of Stanford students and alumni in the highlands of southwestern Haiti since 2000, developing an ethnography of hillside families, their agricultural efforts and other means of livelihood and summarized in “Making it in Rural Haiti: Hillside Farms, Markets, and How Folks Get By.”  Her continuing personal relationship with the people of “Mon Bouton” in Haiti has enabled projects on nutrition and education of children, as well as introduction of technology for communication, lighting and water supply, under the name of "If Pigs Could Fly - Helping Hillside Haiti." (IPCFH)

 

Eric Sabelman, PhD., has been involved with bioengineering (at Stanford, with NASA-JPL and NASA-Ames, at the Palo Alto VA Rehabilitation R&D Center and on the Neurosurgery Dept staff of Kaiser Permanente Hospital) and solar energy (with Volunteers in International Technical Assistance and Santa Clara Solar Research Institute) since the 1970s.  Eric has been a board member of IPCFH since 2009.

 

Randy and Eric will describe the intercultural experiment IPCFH, including how they established their connection to the roughly 80 deeply impoverished families in the southeastern Haitian mountains (who have been ignored by both the Haitian government and nongovernmental relief organizations), how, after the 2010 earthquake, they undertook to provide solar-powered pumps to bring water closer to inhabitants’ homes, and how they see their approach in providing tools for self-help and education being replicated in other, equally overlooked places in the world.