My Projects

Kenny, Jordan and I have been working on building a stove. Yes, a stove. In Southeast Asia, whole communities are being destroyed due to rapid deforestation. (I couldn’t find any good satellite imagery, but the same thing is happening in Africa too, as seen here)

Agricultural expansion (transforming forest to agricultural land) is one of the main reasons, but another cause includes the simple over-use by the local population. Traditionally, villagers might simply put their cooking pots on three rocks that form a triangle, and in the middle of that triangle is a fire below the pot. This is highly ineffective in terms of heat use, and requires much firewood. A stove has been invented which uses all local materials and is significantly more effective in the use of heat and uses significantly less firewood. One hope of using such a stove is that a decreased demand of firewood will ease up on straining the land and its resources and create more sustainable practices.

As Kenny, Jordan and I are building the stove (a Ugandan example of it that I pulled off of the web here is pictured left), we will take pictures and create a curriculum or handbook that can be used to teach villagers how to make these stoves. We hope to include Lahu students in the pictures so it looks more natural to villagers in SE Asia, instead of having a bunch of white people building the stove in the picture. Once we have the curriculum written, we will share it with other workers in the region who can teach it to the locals they have relationships with.

I’m also working on an agricultural market development project. I’ll be interviewing people to gain a better understanding of the local economy of selling agricultural products. Through the research we hope to find with the farmers more beneficial and efficient ways for them to access markets and sell their produce for a higher profit.

For now I’m working on these two projects while also sitting in on two classes with Kenny and Jordan that the students are taking. Through these classes we aim to gain a better understanding of the region to make our work more effective. The first class I’m sitting in on is about the exclusion and exploitation of ethnic groups in the region. People are trafficked for sex and labor, people are driven into prostitution, and many people are victims of land exploitation, slaughter, and even ethnic cleansing by their own government. This class is taught by Christa Crawford, an American woman who runs an organization in Chiang Mai called Garden of Hope which aims towards ministering to the women and children exploited in the red light district of Chiang Mai. The second class is a class on Thai history and religion which taught by a fantastic old Thai man named Dr. Amnuoy. For my Go-ED Africa friends, he’s the Thai version of Dr. Mpagi.