CONGRATULATIONS to the 2011 IDEAS Competition and MIT Global Challenge teams! A record 45 MIT student-led teams entered their innovative public service ideas addressing underserved needs in water, sanitation, agriculture, education and much more. Many of undergraduate and graduate students have been hard at work for the last eight months to enter this year. The Salud del Sol and MIT IIH collaborative Solar-Powered Autoclave is one of the teams.

Meet all the teams at 7:00pm in the lobby. Celebrate their work. Learn which teams will win part of the up to $150,000 in awards this year. We’ll be joined by President Susan Hockfield, our keynote speaker Dr. Akhtar Badshah (MIT Alum) and other special guests.

Details here. RSVP here.

Salud del Sol, Inc. is a proud partner of Solar Day.  Solar Day is an international day that was designed to bring awareness about solar energy, clean technology, and sustainability.  Visit http://www.solarday.com/ for more information and to find out ways you can get involved.

The Program begins with 4 days of classroom learning in Hong Kong, with participants from around the world, including Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, China and Belgium. Following these classes, participants will travel to Aceh, Indonesia to work in partnership with a local farmers cooperative and the UNDP to create a sustainable business plan for the cooperative.

It will be an incredible experience– check back for updates from Asia!

Come to Nicaragua and engage your head, heart, and hands in the real work of developing countries. Our hands-on courses allow you to be immersed in the daily life of rural Nicaraguans by living with host families and working alongside local community members to create their vision of a model community through renewable energy and sustainable practices.

Discuss the theory behind solar energy and the challenges of development with your instructors and other course participants. Spend your days learning how to construct solar cookers, photovoltaic panels, and installing photovoltaic systems. Laugh along with your host family as you try to recall your high school Spanish, balance water on your head or make tortillas. Most activities and classes are held in the new adobe Solar Center. Housing will be simple, like that of a typical rural Nicaraguan family.

Explore a beautiful country and its culture while learning about renewable energy and sustainable development in the field. Our courses provide a unique travel experience that is educational, rewarding, and fun!

This 11-day course, offered twice a year, has been held by Grupo Fenix since 1999. It is a great introduction to the science and use of appropriate renewable energy technologies such as solar cookers, dryers and photo-voltaic systems. Dr. Richard Komp, an expert from the United States with over 40 years experience working with solar technologies, teaches the technical classes for the January version of this course and the July version is based on his methodology for fabrication of PV panels in developing countries. During this 11 day course participants will:

• Visit Suni Solar, a renewable energy business in Managua started by Grupo Fenix
• Build a solar oven with the local women’s group, the Solar Women of Totogalpa
• Listen to talks on Solar Dryers and Medicinal Plants
• Learn about solar cooking and eat the final product of your class!
• Install a PV system with local solar experts
• Make a solar powered battery charger

Also, the course includes various tourist activities such as a visit to nearby beautiful spots in the mountains of northern Nicaragua. If weather permits, we will spend a day exploring the Somoto Canyon and swimming in its natural pools. Also, at the end of the course we will spend a night at a rustic ecolodge in the Tisey Nature Reserve, which has hiking trails, fields of organic vegetables, a farming community that produces its own specialty cheeses and one of the best panoramic views in the country.

The course fee of $995 includes all food and lodging, with a $50 deposit to be sent to the nonprofit Skyheat Associates at PO Box 184, Harrington ME 04643 before December 15th to insure a place in the course, which has a limit of 15 participants and is often completely full. For more information, please contact thegrupofenix@gmail.com or look on-line at www.grupofenix.org for details of all of our programs.

Friday, April 24 at 8:00am in the Kettering Labs Building at the University of Dayton, the design clinic team will be presenting a culmination of the research. They will also be setting forth future research plans for Daniel Hensel and the field team to implement this summer in Nicaragua. For more information about this presentation, please email daniel.hensel@saluddelsol.org.

An exciting outcome of the Global Engagement Summit is the GlobalGiving Project Challenge. Sponsored by the GlobalGiving Foundation, the Project Challenge competition gives students two weeks to try to raise at least $4,000 from 50 donors. Organizations that reach $4,000 are allowed to keep their projects on the site to continue to raise funds. The top three projects also receive bonuses totaling $6,000. The Project Challenge is held from April 17 – May 8.

Salud del Sol is incredibly excited and honor to be participating in the GlobalGiving project challenge! The funds raised from this endeavor will support the field research of the solar autoclave this summer in Sabana Grande, Nicaragua. The field team this summer has an incredible opportunity to prototype and test the system design from that the UD Design Clinic team has developed. The research plans for this summer also include, capacity building classes for Las Mujeres Solares on the research and testing of the solar autoclave, as well as classes in marketing and entrepreneurship. Also, once testing has proven the solar autoclave design successful, we will be enlisting the support of local doctors from Nicaragua to begin clinical testing of the solar autoclave to guarantee pathogens are eliminated from the instruments, ensuring complete sterilization.

Please visit our GlobalGiving project page to learn more about how you can support the solar autoclave research this summer!