Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Low Hanging Fruit. Central Europe and Development Aid for Africacooperate with SCI and later invited the organization to western Kenya for an environmentalseminar he arranged at the school. 207Tomáš’s contribution to technology transfer was not in any way limited to simply solarcookers. Along with the parents of his teachers, he founded the do-it-yourself HarmonyDevelopment Group and used the summer vacation periods in 2008, 2009 and 2010 toincrease awareness and the practice among people from Malava and its surroundings ofmany other forms of efficient and readily available technology. These technologies have thepotential to fundamentally improve the lives and health of hundreds of millions of Africansand to contribute to maintaining environmental stability and protecting nature in Africa.Such technologies are termed appropriate technologies and include clay ovens for cookingthat use a third of the wood or charcoal traditional African cooking techniques on threestones consume, as well as simple sand filters that increase the cleanliness of drinkingwater, elementary sterilization of drinking water using ultra-violent light by exposing PETplastic bottles to sunlight, planting trees to capture nitrogen in the atmosphere to helpenrich poor African soil, the establishment of nurseries to spread these trees and manyother similar activities. In 2010 they erected the first dry toilet in Malava 208 that had everbeen erected in western Kenya. This simple technology separates urine from solid wasteand allows for the solid waste to be composted and then used as manure. Urine is thinnedwith water at a ratio of around 8 to 1 or more and then used as a nitrogen, phosphorus andmagnesium-rich fertilizer.Tomáš’s story illustrates a number of critical details. First it is an example that we don’tall have to be doctors and healthcare works in order to be active in Africa: a majority ofcentral Europeans are educated to a standard far above the African standard, which wouldenable many more, if they so choose, to make a meaningful contribution to developmentefforts in Africa. Examples include teachers, the bearers of new ideas and technologies andbuilders of networks and contacts (as Tomáš Miléř did when inviting people from the Nairobibranch of SCI to Malava) including such connections between Africans and the rest ofthe world. One of the consequences of poverty is isolation: just like for most Europeans duringthe Middle Ages where life was spent within a 10 kilometre circle of the family village,the mobility of most of Africa’s population is very low when compared to ours. This limitstheir options to both observe new things from other countries and to learn from perhapsa larger city or capital. Of course our relatively good level of general education does notmean we should all take off to Africa without any semblance of training. Just the opposite,the better and more wide-ranging such preparations, the more capable a volunteer is tohelp and the larger the development impact.207 Photos from this first seminar and later activities undertaken by Tomáš Miléř in western Kenya can befound on his website: http://amper.ped.muni.cz/~miler/indi/solarcookers.php.208 Chinese civilization has recycled human solid waste since ancient times, and is certainly one of themechanisms that have allowed them to farm land continuously for thousands of years while retainingfertile soil. Contemporary sources have noted that hundreds of thousands of such dry separation toiletsare in use in China today.233