Two Wartburg College student-led projects have each received $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grants.
Junior Mullohoji Juraev will travel this summer to Shurab, Tajikistan, to improve learning conditions at a public school in his home country. Seniors Max Chinnah and Megan Weichers will use the grant to construct and test their solar-powered cookers in Ghana.
Philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis founded Davis Projects for Peace in 2007 to celebrate her 100th birthday. Davis, who died in 2013, committed $1 million annually to fund 100 grass-roots efforts by college students. Wartburg students have received a grant every year since the program’s inception. This is the first year Wartburg has received funding for two projects.
The Voices of the Forgotten Town
Public education in Tajikistan has yet to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent five-year civil war. Shurab, once a successful mining town, has hung on despite a sharp decline in population, a lack of jobs and the closing of two schools. The one remaining public school serves 250 students ranging in age from 7 to 18.
“I studied a few grades in Shurab. The weather there was the same as here, so imagine no heating system and cracked windows,” Juraev said. “We never took off our coats. It’s hard for students to get a quality education. Many have lost hope for a better future through education and have dropped out of school.”
Juraev will use his grant to provide the school with new windows (he’s already raised money for new heaters, which were installed last fall), build a library with books in Tajik and install computers with Internet connections. He also has partnered with Wartburg professor Joyce Boss and students Ellie Schaffer of Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, and Danielle Langowski of Winona, Minnesota, to train the teachers on more effective methods of teaching.
Project Solaris
Chinnah and Weichers of Dike will construct and distribute solar-powered cookers equipped with a lithium ion phosphate battery that can store enough solar energy to function day and night, a feature that sets the team’s product apart from others on the market. The team will train approximately 50 Ghanaian youth to construct the cookers.
“It all goes back to my childhood experience of having my grandma die from a host of respiratory issues caused by in-house pollution generated by the constant burning of firewood to prepare meals,” Chinnah said, who grew up in Nigeria.
According to the World Health Organization, more than 4 million people die prematurely from illnesses attributable to the indoor burning of firewood and fossil fuels, both common sources of energy in many African countries. This dependence also has led to massive deforestation in the region.
Project Solaris also received a $3,000 grant from the Resolution Project at the fifth annual Igniting Innovation Summit at Harvard University.