Emancipated from the Smoky Kitchen by the Power of the Sun

This scene might look like just another day in the life of a Malian housewife. But in fact, this is far from a portrait of mundane drudgery - rather, this scene captures the quiet struggle of women's empowerment and feminist revolution.



You see, something is missing from this picture - were it to capture the quotidian labors of the average Malian woman. Deborah Dao cooks her family three square meals a day - a responsibility which in this economy requires nearly constant preparation and cooking. Most women spend all day pounding millet, mixing the batter, chopping firewod and fanning the flames to cook their family's toh, but here there is no burning hearth, no fire, no smoke.

On a closer look, you can see that Deborah is cooking with a solar oven - a wonderful appliance made by local carpenters with their own wood and just a few imported materials which harnesses solar radiation to collect heat energy.



If Deborah prepares her family's lunch early in the morning and places it in her solar oven, by noon it's ready to eat. And she is free of the tedious labor of fanning the flames for hours at a time.



Now that she no longer has to spend all morning in the smoky kitchen inhaling the noxious fumes and tars of wood smoke, Deborah can occupy her time with various cottage industries. She makes shea butter, soap, liquid soap and incense to sell at market and earn money for herself and her children. On this day, she is sewing garments for her neighbors; a Westerner might think that Deborah is still relegated to traditional "women's work", but here in Mali, most women are too busy fanning the flames of the hearth to engage in much income-generating activity - most taylors are men. Deborah, on the other hand, is the only female taylor in the entire Commune of Sanadougou.

Let There be Light unto Xanadu!

When I signed up for this gig, at first I was kind of apprehensive about housing because most Malians live in mud huts that collapse every rainy season. But my mud hut is awesome! A nice Christian NGO which once operated in Sanadougou built this structure for their employees, and so I have a bedroom, a kitchen, a mud room, a walk-in closet, and a completely empty room reserved for silent meditation. It is the perfect place for me to slowly lose my marbles over the next two years.

For the first time in my life, I think I should thank Jesus.

Just as Jesus gave me a home, he also gave me a tropical fruit and vegetable garden. As I gradually integrate into this community of subsistence agriculture I am learning to take care of my own plot of millet, corn, beans, okra, sweet potatoes, hot peppers, oranges, bananas, papayas and guavas which the Son of God gave me as a house-warming present. It is my own little plot of organic paradise. God has bestowed unto me water and firmament which brings forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind. And it is good.


Nevertheless, my homeboy upstairs was quite erratic when it came to bringing forth light. Between the hours of 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon the blistering African Sun is so strong that even the Malians do not dare leave the shade of their gwa – which is an overhang made out of sticks and millet stalks and palm fronds. I presume as punishment for all of those things I said about Him not existing and all back in my bar mitzvah sermon, God has punished me by leaving my yard completely bereft of shade. So I told God to go screw Himself and I built my own gwa and I tied a hammock underneath so I can hide from the noonday sun and read the works of Nietzsche just to spite the vindictive son of a bitch.



Just as He is overly generous with the Sun’s rays when they are needed least, God is rather stingy about letting there be light when I most need it – like when I wake up in the middle of the night and realize there’s a chameleon crawling on my mattress. I was able to go for months without direct current, and I have a headlamp so it’s not so bad. But the second time my semi-naked self woke up to a chameleon which somehow got inside of my mosquito net and had to catch it under my sheets in pitch blackness I decided that enough is enough. I want electricity.

One problem: the rural Malian village of Sanadougou is not yet connected to anything resembling a power grid. Many people have televisions to watch the god-awful Brazilian soap opera which dominates all cultural life between 7:00 and 7:30 P.M., and there is an interesting system going on here where people power their televisions with car batteries. There are a total of 3 cars in a village of 4,428 persons, but everyone seems to have a car battery.

So I went to the market and bought my own car battery, some wires, alligator clips and with the help of my friend who happens to moonlight as an electrician I set up a functioning circuit for a fluorescent light bulb. And I had light to read at night for about a week. And then my battery died. I was told there were two means readily available in town to recharge it:

Option 1: I could pay someone a day’s worth of food money to rev up their gasoline generator. I ruled out this option because I am earnestly trying to divorce myself from the fossil fuel economy which is a primary cause of America’s stagnation, funding terrorism, causing the aquatic genocide of the coral atoll nations of Kiribati and the Maldives, and driving the polar bear to extinction. Also, I would prefer to eat for a day.

Option 2: I could become a member of the church which has a solar array on the roof to power their loudspeakers with which they let the congregants charge their batteries on off-days. This option is completely renewable and environmentally friendly, so I actually considered it. But as grateful as I am to Jesus for my tropical fruit garden, Hell is going to freeze over before Zac Mason becomes a member of a church.

In so many words, I was told that if I wanted to charge my car battery, I would have to accept either Jesus or Petroleum into my life. Though as much as I want electricity, I do not value a charged battery more than my spiritual independence.

This was on the back of my mind one noon as I was sitting under my millet stalk gwa perusing through the Book of Exodus and reading about the Hebrews’ construction of the Pyramids to satisfy the vanity of a single earthly man. As I pondered Pharaoh’s enslavement of my people to labor in the sweltering Sun, I remembered that even though the Egyptian potentates thought themselves to be gods among men, even they believed that there was one deity in their pantheon supreme above all: Ra, the god of the Sun. I thought that maybe if I want to take ten steps forward to spiritual freedom, maybe I have to take a step back to Bronze Age polytheism. And that is how I decided to become a Sun worshipper.

So I went to the hardware store in the big city and bought my own 50-watt photovoltaic solar panel. Never before have I possessed an electrical appliance of such spiritual and political import. Before I had a little Solio which is fine for things you might bring on an extended camping trip like a cell phone, an iPod, a GPS locator. But this 50-watt solar panel is the real thing; I can use it to charge batteries, to power up fluorescent light bulbs, to power my computer – I could even blast a fan if I so desired. There isn’t a single comfort of the Electric Age that I could realistically want that I can’t power with my solar panel. In honor of my favorite advocate of renewable energy, I call him “Al”.


Now one of the first things that this born-again heliotheist does every morning is place my buddy Al in front of the powerful, direct radiation of the early morning Sun. I kneel before Ra in supplication of his dominion over my electrical consumption and also photosynthesis for Jesus’ papaya patch. And as I go about the day I adjust its angle ever so slightly to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. O Ra, bless me with sustenance! O powerful Ra, bestow unto me energy!

The next time a chameleon finds its way into my sleeping place, I can flick a switch and say “Let there be Light!” and squash it much easier. What is more, not one penny of my money ever has to line the palaces of the House of Saud ever again.

Back in the U.S.A., so-called “realistic” businesspeople tend to pooh-pooh the potential of solar energy as a silly gimmick and that the best we can hope for change in the energy market is find more oil in America. Such “realistic” individuals also told me that instead of joining the Peace Corps I should get a real job for a serious company like Lehman Brothers. Just to prove all of those naysayers wrong, from now on I am going to avoid at all costs charging my car battery, my light bulbs, my computer, my iPod or any other appliance with even a single electron released from the breakdown of fossil fuels. Even this blog is now powered with solar energy. From this point in time until the year Infinite I shall derive my electrical sustenance from the daily supplication of the Sun god Ra.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can suck on my photovoltaic generator.

Global Warming > Africa's Desertification

If global warming hasn't yet hit home enough for you to cut your personal carbon footprint, install solar panels on your roof and convert your Jeep Wrangler into a grease car, here are a few articles which highlight just how bad greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, are going to absolutely annihilate precipitation levels and the water tables of Africa. At this rate, global warming is projected to reduce flows on the Niger River - the lifeblood of Guinea, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Nigeria - by roughly 33 percent. If the Niger River dries up, and the Sahara Desert overtakes the greater part of Mali, even relatively lush agricultural plains like Segou Province are going to soon look like Timbouctou Province - vast expanses of uninhabitable, uninterrupted sand.

http://www.grida.no/climate/IPCC_tar/wg2/384.htm

Mali and the respective nations depending upon the Niger River are doing something about it - and as proof that the World Bank is not the absolute epitome of evil, Robert Zoellick is doing something at least to help conserve the river. http://www.lesafriques.com/en/news/africa/the-silent-call-to-save-the-niger-river.html?Itemid=35?articleid=0084

You can find out pretty much everything there is to know about global warming and the rapid desertification of the African continent here: http://www.thesahara.net/terraform_sahara_desert.htm

If you are an investment banker from Connecticut, droughts might be an unsightly eyesore if your country club can't use their sprinkler to keep the 8th hole pleasing to the eye; if you are a millet farmer in Mali struggling to grow enough grain to feed your eight children, a drought means that soon you will have zero children. I emphasize, the brunt of global warming is going to fall on the backs subsistence pastoralists and herders in the Sahel countries bordering on the Sahara Desert; Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Sudan.

You see, climate change has happened in the past; in fact, it is the reason why the broad northern expanse of Africa is now the Sahara Desert in the first place. Believe it or not, back in the day like in 8000 B.C. what once served as the desert backdrop of Tatooine was lush farmland where humans consumed water freely with crocodiles and hippopatomouses

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/science/15sahara.html?ref=world

And gradually, due to the kind of organic, completely meterological and unanthrogenic climate change, that lush savannah became the Sahara Desert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/science/09sahara.html?ref=science

Back in 8000 B.C. when people worshipped cats and thought that rains could be augured via the ritual slaughter of goats and less politically desirable people, there was nothing that people could do to avert the dessication of Africa and the expansion of the Sahara. The only change in that cataclysmic shift in human population was the advent of the Pharaohs and the birth of classical Egyptian civilization.

And if we don't reduce our wanton fossil fuel consumption culture dead by at least 80 percent by 2050, all of West Africa up to the Atlantic coast is going to be uninterrupted desert. One day archaeologists are going to go to the house where I live in Diaramana, dig out my dogeared copies of the work of Al Gore, my itty bitty solar panel, and say "It seems as if some humans at least understood that they were shooting themselves in the foot... but they kept on shooting themselves in the foot!" Those future archaeologists will probably be refugees from the erstwhile nation of the Maldives which has since been inundated by the Indian Ocean

But now, decades after the American people demonstrated our capacity to liberate Europe AND Asia, defeat Communism, send men to the Moon and even manufacture Dippin' Dots - the ice cream of the future - it's time to start doing something about global warming. No, signing an online petition and forwarding it to all of your friends is not going to halt the expansion of the Sahara Desert. Calling your Congressman to do something about it is only going to consume more electricity. It's time for all of us First Worlders to get off our fat asses and figure out how to minimize our energy consumption, particularly our fossil fuel energy consumption.

Y'know how I reduced my carbon footprint? For starters, I moved to Mali. Here I am not connected to any electric grid. I get 95 percent of my transportation done by foot or bicycle. Fyi: I have in my possession exactly 4 appliances: my cell phone, camera, iPod and the computer that I use to update this nifty blog. I am living the dream of the Digital Age. And I can get all the energy that I need to power these babies with my little baby Solio panel. Oh wait - I lied... I also have a flashlight which is powered with my hairy hands. And I have gotten used to the stultifying heat - I just deal with it. When I think of my coworkers at a progressive Manhattan office wearing winter jackets to work because the air condition was kept at a crispy 55 degrees, I think that the amount of electricity that people spend on thermostats is absolute insanity.

While people with hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in the developed world wait for The Government to do something about retooling America's energy infrastructure (I wouldn't hold my breath) people in Africa are taking the private initiative to increase their standard of living and resist the advancing Sahara Desert. My next-door neighbor in Diaramana is a doctor who makes what would be considered below the poverty line in America, and he has a big solar panel which he uses to power his 21st century luxuries like his cell phone, television and refrigerator. Ladies and gentlemen sitting in your air-conditioned splendor in the States, if you have any disposable income and all, it's time to buy solar paneling for your roof, for your backyard, for your neighbor's roof. Solar panels are beautiful, functionally, symbolically and aesthetically! They make great birthday presents! Buy a solar panel today!