The medical centers provide crucial aid to approximately 200,000 refugees who have fled Burma because of the catastrophic, genocidal efforts of its military-dominated government.

Located in numerous locations along the border of Burma and Thailand, the remote clinics help people with serious injuries and also with basic care. They are often the only source of medical care refugees have. About 1 million displaced people are estimated to be hiding in the heavily land-mined border zone, doing their best to hang on despite the ever-present possibility of violence.

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The effort to train medical staff so that they could travel to these remote facilities and install solar power systems received top honors at this year’s Energy Globe Awards, competing among 800 environmental projects from 111 countries.

The significance of the effort cannot be understated, as the care centers available to these desperate people were without electricity prior to the training project. The risk of the Burmese military attacking clinics has demanded the use of less permanent, flexible medical facilities. Now that solar power has been installed in many of the mobile clinics, medical personnel can operate more easily on patients who have urgent needs during night hours. Laptops can also be used to assess important medical databases. Communication devices and microscopes can be powered, as well as refrigerators for life-saving vaccines. An eye doctor was even able to start providing cataract surgeries last year: something that was not possible before without electricity.

According to a news release from the Energy Globe website, the Burma solar clinic project won this year’s overall grand prize in a landslide and received a standing ovation. The awards ceremony took place in the Czech Republic earlier this week, and was attended by many of Europe’s key environmental leaders. To read more about the Energy Globe competition click here.

How You Can Help Contribute to the Burma Project and Others

While the remarkable achievement to bring solar power to Burmese mobile clinics is credited to a partnership of groups, our friends at the non-profit Green Empowerment played a crucial role in the project. I’ve written before about one of their successful partnership projects that brought wind power to a small community in Peru that previously had no electricity. With an emphasis on alternative energy and small green initiatives that build community capacity and improve quality of life, Green Empowerment has become a major player in conservation efforts throughout the world.

Proof of this status is clear not only because Green Empowerment is involved with the Burma solar clinics, but also because one of their projects in Nicaragua was also a finalist for the top honors in the Energy Globe’s water category. Green Empowerment has a wealth of detailed information on their website about the Burma solar clinic project, as well as their other efforts worldwide. Their projects are financed via grants and also by people like us.

If you’d like to donate money or resources to the effort to bring solar power to medical clinics in the Burma area, or to other projects, please visit Green Empowerment’s website at www.greenempowerment.org.

Photo Courtesy of Green Empowerment

There is no recent conflict in Africa that has elicited so much debate around the world and in the United States, in particular, as Darfur. Not even the post election political skirmishes in Kenya drew so much attention. Kenya, once the darling of the continent, the erstwhile adversaries are today sharing a cup of tea as well as power, something unthinkable only two months ago.

In a 2007 newspaper article, UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said: “Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand - an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.”

What does this mean? The Darfur conflict inflicts even more damage on Sudan’s environmental degradation with nearly two million internally displaced people putting pressure on the fragile environment as they clear land and source ground water to survive.

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