Electricity-Generating Merry-Go-Rounds in Ghana

BYU technology students and professor Charles Harrell worked with teachers at the Golden Sunbeam School in Essam village, Ghana, to install an electricity-generating merry-go-round. Some 10,000 schools in Ghana have no electricity.

“It’s a double dream come true,” says Monica Opare, founder of the Golden Sunbeam charity school, “because we are going to get equipment that the children can play with and then at the same time we are going to get electricity from it and that is exciting.”

“These villages and schools don’t have electricity. As children push the merry-go-round, it [generates] electricity that [lights] the school rooms,” says BYU professor Charles Harrell from the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology.  The first project was completed in 2008.

The project was co-sponsored by Empower Playgrounds, Inc. and BYU’s special Capstone project program, wherein technology students plan and complete projects for real business needs.

“Our objective overall is to improve quality of life in rural Ghana,” says Empower Playgrounds founder Ben Markham. “This project will enhance education by providing power for lighting, giving children opportunities for fun and also giving them a hands-on science laboratory.”

“In the rural villages the kids almost have no toys. I seldom saw the kids playing with anything other than a car tire or something else that could be used as a wheel,” says Markham, a retired engineer who served in Ghana as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

When he approached BYU about the project, Markham challenged BYU students to engineer a device that could generate power but would be fun, not work, for the children. To make it fun to ride, the students used a gearbox to multiply the rotation speed and incorporated circuitry to limit the amount of energy extracted from the system.

“The spinning is converted through a gearbox. The gearbox takes their rotation and multiplies it by 35, which then spins the generator and the generator is what converts that energy into electrical energy,” says BYU technology student Ben Drewry.

“So we’ve tried to balance fun, and getting an interesting amount of power from the device,” says Markham.

The power generated by the merry-go-round is stored in a car battery that recharges several dozen portable LED lights that can be used in classrooms and homes. Many families have little or no lighting in the evenings, relying on kerosene lamps, candles, or open flame “bobo” lights. Markham hopes that better lighting at home will lead to greater literacy and productivity for children and their families.

“Once the students have finished learning in the schoolrooms, they’re able to take one of these lamps home with them to light their homes,” added Harrell.

“We can right now have light for the kids, we can have evening classes, their parents can encourage them to do their assignments at home, and I can just imagine what it is going to be like; it’s like a liberation,” says Opare.

Although the current system is designed to charge the LED lights, Markham says the merry-go-round can be used for other applications.

“The amount of power available would easily recharge cell phones and laptop computers, which will probably be uses we’ll look to in the future,” he says.

With donor support, Empower Playgrounds hopes to bring inexpensive lighting and playground equipment to thousands of schools in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa.

BYU engineering and technology students worked more than a year on the prototype merry-go-round which is designed to be built with materials available in Ghana including recycled car parts.

“What we’d like to accomplish is not just to build a single prototype but to define a process, that is replicable, so that other facilities in Ghana, and in any part of the world, could duplicate this same process,” says Harrell.

In May, students from the Marriott School of Management met with Ghanaian education officials and made village school visits to identify site selection criteria for future Empower Playgrounds projects. In addition to the merry-go-round design, EPI is also investigating designs for an electricity-generating zip line and a swing set to provide additional play and power for village schools. For more information, see www.empowerplaygrounds.org.

Watch a short video about the project.

See the full report.

Read about Empower Systems’ Founder, Ben Markham.

LDS, Islamic Leaders, share relief efforts

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has partnered with Islamic Relief USA to provide assistance in the wake of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.  The partnership continued with emergency relief response following the May 2006 Indonesian earthquake.  In July, 2009, leaders of Islamic Relief USA met in Salt Lake City with LDS Church leaders.  Together, they toured church humanitarian aid facilities.  Abed Ayoub cited recent talks with the Jordanian government, saying that the LDS Church was highlighted.

Islamic Relief USA is part of the larger Islamic Relief Worldwide family of charities.  The worldwide entity recently celebrated its 25 year anniversary.  The USA branch has been operating since 1993.  Islamic Relief is one of 1,500 registered non-government organizations and charitable agencies across the world that partner in humanitarian efforts with the LDS Church.

After the 2004 tsunami, the Church provided immediate relief by supplying water, food, hygiene kits, medical supplies, body bags, blankets, and clothing.  Long-term assistance by the Church is still ongoing, with home construction, the construction of schools and clinics, water and sanitation systems, and other projects under way.

In May, 2006, Islamic Relief provided a jumbo jet to transport $1.6 million worth of relief supplies provided by the Church after the Indonesian earthquake.  Islamic Relief was impressed that there were no strings attached to the generous donation of aid.  “[There was] no price tag and no attempts at conversion,” said Ahmad El Bendary, Senior Advisor for Islamic Relief.  “The Church has been welcomed with open arms because of their neutrality.”

The “Third Pillar” of Islam is called the principle of zakat, or the principle of charitable giving.  Muslims donate 2.5 percent of their annual savings, 10 percent of their investment net profits, and a third of their crops to charitable projects.  Mormons donate 10 percent of their income to the Church, and a monthly donation to the poor.  There are also separate funds for education benefits and humanitarian aid that Mormons routinely donate to through the Church.  In addition, Mormons donate many hours of labor to the Church’s humanitarian efforts.  Said Diana Sufian, a senior humanitarian consultant for Islamic Relief, “This is God’s work, whether it be in the language of Islam or the language of the Mormons.  It’s a moral obligation.  We can do it — so we must do it.”

From Deseret News.com

Mormons Partner with the U.S. Navy

Atlantic Ocean 1 July 2009

Volunteers from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are working alongside the United States Navy and other relief organizations as part of a humanitarian and medical training mission that is blessing the lives of thousands.

Aboard the USNS Comfort , a full-service medical hospital ship, Latter-day Saint volunteers are among those making stops in seven different countries in the Caribbean, South America and Central America on a mission called Continuing Promise 2009. At each stop, medical personnel and volunteers perform much-needed surgeries ranging from cleft palate reconstruction to cataract repair.

Dr. Susan Puls, Latter-day Saint volunteer medical coordinator, was asked to secure the volunteers for the mission in just two short weeks.  Miraculously, medical volunteers from among church members appeared very quickly.

The ship is spending between 10 to 12 days at each of seven destinations: Haiti, Dominican Republic, Antigua, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Patients needing surgery are flown aboard the ship by helicopter where they are treated and remain for a short recovery. Meanwhile, additional volunteers travel to the shore in a 40-passenger boat each day to set up temporary clinics in schools and community centers. There they provide a variety of medical services to those who otherwise cannot afford it. To date, Continuing Promise 2009 personnel and volunteers have treated 56,000 people and have performed nearly 1,000 surgeries. Over 90,000 operations and procedures will be performed before the mission ends 31 July 2009.  In all, more than 40 Latter-day Saint volunteers will serve aboard the Comfort.

Full-time Church missionaries serving in the nations visited by the Comfort act as interpreters and help coordinate logistics. In the Dominican Republic alone, 25 full-time missionaries provided translation for doctors and other medical practitioners at on-shore clinics.

In addition to coordinating volunteers, the Church has donated nearly 250 pallets of humanitarian relief supplies, including medical resources, vitamins, hygiene kits, newborn kits, school kits, orphanage supplies, quilts, toys, first aid kits and blankets. These supplies have been donated to various organizations throughout the participating countries.

Mormon Author Helps Foster Care Kids

Mormon Author Helps Foster Care Kids

Popular author Richard Paul Evans, who wrote The Christmas Box, Grace: A Novel,  Timepiece, The Letter, and The Five Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me About Life and Wealth, sponsors Christmas Box International.   Richard Paul Evans is a Latter-day Saint.  Christmas Box International is now associated with Operation Kids®.  Operation Kids sponsors the Christmas Box Lifestart Initiative with the motto, “Until every child is OK.”

Operation Kids has been around for a decade.  The organization supports charities that help secure the education, health, safety and well-being of kids.  Examples include the following:

• Improving Safety through The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s “Net Smartz” program.
• Improving Health through the life-changing and life-saving medical procedures of Operation Smile and the Children’s Organ Transplant Association.
• Improving Well-Being through Right To Play’s effective programs teaching conflict resolution through sport, in more than 23 countries.
• Improving Education in New Orleans through the Edible Schoolyard project, funding for summer science internships at New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School and programs for intellectually disabled children provided by Best Buddies.

The Christmas Box Initiative focuses on youth who are or who have been in foster care:

“Each year, more than 24,000 youths age out of the foster care system in America . These are teens that were never adopted, nor able to return to the homes from which they were removed due to abuse, neglect and abandonment. Many of these youth leave foster care as young as 18 years old. Without a family or support network, they face almost insurmountable challenges as they try to navigate the difficulties of adulthood, including incarceration, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, mental illness, poverty, homelessness and suicide. With the right resources, however, they have a much higher chance of success. 

“In October 2008, Operation Kids joined with Christmas Box International to help raise money for the Christmas Box Lifestart Initiative.  Each Lifestart kit provides youth aging out of the foster care system with important necessities including dinnerware, cooking utensils, first aid supplies, bedding, a tool kit, towels, information on local resources available to them, and much more.  As of December 31, 2008, more than $50,000 had been raised online for the Lifestart initiative, providing Lifestart kits for nearly 1,000 youth.  The funding also allows the program to grow to several new states in 2009.  Operation Kids will match every donation, dollar-for-dollar, contributed toward the Christmas Box Lifestart kits. (Read More.)

Church Helps Bring Water to African Communities

LUPUTA, Democratic Republic of the Congo 17 April 2009

Residents of the town of Luputa in Africa’s Democratic Republic of the Congo are celebrating the arrival of clean, fresh water to a region which has known only scarce water from shallow wells since the 1950’s. A dependable water system has been in the works for the last few years but residents lacked the money to complete it.

Humanitarian service missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assessed the situation and determined that the Church was in a position to help.  The Church helped to fund the project.  This took much discussion and examination of what would be required to pipe clean water 19 miles through five communities.  The Church provided more than financial aid.  It provided engineering services.

A water distribution system comprised of smaller pipes will deliver the water throughout the village of Tshiabobo to 40 water stations. All the trenches are hand dug by the people in the villages who will receive the water. On one given day, 83 people were requested to clear foliage to make room for the pipeline, and 206 showed up to work.

A significant benefit of this type of water line is it requires no pump or electricity. Spring-capture systems require virtually no maintenance, and they last three times longer than wells. Even in the dry season, the spring source for the project continues to flow at over six gallons per second.

The people have contributed $3,000, which they used to develop the spring sources. Residents will manage the gravity-fed system through a community water and sanitation board. The board’s responsibility is to ensure water quality, determine fees and perform regular maintenance.

A nine inch pipe feeds water from a nearby source and carries it nine miles to the village of Tshiabobo. After this large pipe was in place, the next phase of the project extends the pipeline another ten miles to Luputa. Once the entire project is complete more than 166,000 people will have clean water.

Update — November 2009

Dancing, shouts of joy and speeches marked the end of a significant milestone for residents recently in several villages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Water finally gushed out from an 18-mile-long pipe to the African villages of Tshiabobo, Mafumba, Kasha, Ibola and will be in Luputa City by next summer.

Members of the project development committee praised the Church for “the end of our misery, for the end of all the difficulties to have a water supply; that we can affirm today has saved our children from the murderous diarrhea and from all of the sicknesses that come from dirty water that have for a long time overwhelmed our people.”

Two more phases have yet to be completed in the Luputa water project. The next phase channels water to Luputa and in the outskirts where 130,000 people live and 34 kilometers from the springs. The trenches for this stage are close to being completed. Water stations will be completed for the small villages of Mafumba, Kasha, and Ibola. Phase three is the final stage of the project, the construction of the distribution network for the people of Luputa.

The objective of the Church’s clean water initiative is to improve the health of communities by providing access to sustainable clean water sources.  Depending on local needs and circumstances, these water sources include wells (or boreholes), water storage and delivery systems, and water purification systems. Since 2002, the Church has helped five million people in over 4,500 communities obtain access to clean water sources.

Clean water projects have enjoyed long-term sustainability because communities are involved in the planning and implementation of each project and community representatives are trained on system maintenance prior to project completion.

Wendy & Giff Nielsen: Giving Gifts Back to the World

Giff and Wendy Nielsen have been married for 33 years. They have six children and nine grandchildren. They have lived in Houston for thirty years starting when the Houston Oilers drafted Giff in May 1978. He played quarterback for the team for six years before retiring in May 1984 to join the Channel 11 News anchor team.

The WON Heart Foundation, founded by the Nielsen family has served the Houston community and the world. The mission of this family foundation is to find ways to make the world a stronger, safer, more peaceful place…one heart at a time. The Nielsen family firmly believes that there has never been a greater need for traditional family values and open- hearted generosity to help in healing a troubled world. Some of The Won Heart Foundation successes include raising money to help bridge the gap of the latch-key kid revolution, and hosting a charity golf tournament, which has raised nearly five million dollars for the past 21 years funding the building of Houston area parks and a YMCA after-school program.

Giff is on the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America, Sam Houston Area Council. He has been inducted into the BYU Hall of Fame, the Utah Hall of Fame and into the College Football Hall of Fame.

The most important career accomplishment either of them has is their family. The world needs strong families with loving connections and a desire to reach out and share with communities.

For official Mormon news and information about current Church humanitarian projects visit the newsroom for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Inadvertently called by friends of other faiths as the “Mormon Church”)

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