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Light Up Costa Rica: International Partners Bring Lighting to the Rain Forest

A solar-powered LED lighting demonstration started a partnership between our Canadian Y Service Club, indigenous groups in Costa Rica, and the Costa Rica YMCA. A student eco-tour provided the inspiration to turn this opportunity into a project with educational, economic, health and safety, and environmental benefits. We have partnered with the Costa Rica YMCA, the Y's Service Club of San Jose, and four indigenous organizations. The presentation at Peace Action, a peace and social issues focused leadership development event, highlighted the complexities of turning the concepts of a Culture of Peace into practical activity and sustainable development.

We are providing a training programme for several indigenous people to transfer the skills and knowledge of solar power systems and installation, and expertise in micro-finance development, to their local communities. This moves the project toward sustainability. The Y's Service Club of San Jose is an important partner, along with the YMCA in Costa Rica. The Y has had a long history of providing advocacy and aid to the Indigenous Peoples of Costa Rica. In our November 08 trip we purchased solar panels form a porject in Nicaragua next door that was set up to provide employment to farmers injured by landmines. As of March of 2009 the newly developed financial tracking system has been implemented. 2010 has been a busy time. The Y Service Club in San Jose was actively involved through 2 youth who helped with training new installers with the APPTA organization in the Talamanca. We are moving rapidly toward a transparent and sutainable project!

The LUTW (www.lutw.org) program – the source of our lighting technology – has introduced this system in places where the environment is vulnerable to inroads of development, power corridors, etc. Other projects include ones to reduce deforestation, light up 1000 aid stations in Papua New Guinea, protect gorilla habitat, and for the Ghana Hippo Sanctuary; all factors involved in the rain forest of Costa Rica.

We are starting to experiment with other optons for the lighting technology, and trying to find an optimal fit for this rain forest region. Part of that effort is focused on monitoring the performance of our 5 watt and 11 watt systems. The Owen Sound Club will be doing some experiments with the open source Arduino technology through this fall. We hope to develop a remotely accessible data logging test utility. Imagine surfing to perfomance data - battery level, sun intensity, power production of the solar panel, for a system installed in Shiroles at Finca Educativa from here in Owen Sound! A link to Information about the Arduino project is listed below. For more infomration about this project, contact Brian Minielly.