Let’s help!

When the earth starts to move beneath our feet, we experience how sensitive and fragile our environment is and how little attention we pay to it on a daily basis. We lose our children, parents and neighbours, all our worldly goods, our cultural heritage; all the infrastructure that we have been building up our whole lives. An earthquake robs us of our trust in our innate abilities and makes us uncertain, sad and humble in the face of the chaos and the loss. It paralyses us and takes away our source of daily nourishment, because even the fields that we farm are destroyed.

More than a million people have lost their homes in Nepal in recent days. More aftershocks are hampering the clear-up and the aid efforts. We in Portugal live as well on uncertain ground ourselves.

ECO123 is in direct contact with Madan Thapa Magar (23) and his family in Katmandu, who have survived the earthquake. He visited us here in Portugal last autumn and reported with our author Martin Kämpchen about many aspects of life in rural Nepal. At such a critical moment, we have decided not to sit back and do nothing but rather to start an aid project for Nepal and to make a long-term contribution to the reconstruction of the country.

As a first, immediate measure, ECO123 will be sending up to 100 solar kits to Nepal for mobile electricity generation. Would you like to assist us with this? Each solar kit, which we arrange with our partners FF Solar Aljezur from the producers www.fosera.com includes a solar panel, a battery, a lamp and a multiple socket for charging mobile phones, radios and laptops.

We are sending these solar kits from Monchique with UPS via an airlift organised by the aid organisation RESIC (in Nepalgunj) to the charitable Women’s Foundation Nepal (WFN) in Kathmandu,

• which will be given 40 solar kits for their tent camps, kindergartens, schools and women’s refuges for mothers to be, and for their organic farms;
•  20 solar kits will go to the mountain farmers’ organisation SECARD, which is delivering urgently needed medicines, food, tents and tarpaulins to the mountain villages;
• 10 solar kits will go to the Tashi Waldorf school in Kathmandu;
• 10 solar kits will go to the Wisdom School;
• 10 solar kits will go to the PAM Nestling Home (children’s home);
• 10 solar kits will go to the Nepalese aid organisation WATCH and the soup kitchens.

An initial consignment of 24 solar kits set off on Monday 17th May from Portugal to Nepal via India. Others are to follow in June and July. If you as an ECO123 reader would like to take part in our project, please make a tax-deductible donation to the magazine ECO123’s charitable staff association.

Sponsor a solar kit for Nepal for €50 and receive a tree for your garden from ECO123: chest nut or cork oak.

Thank you.

Uwe Heitkamp

P.S.: We will keep you continuously and transparently updated about all our activities. We launched this blog where you will be able to find out the latest news.