By Roos Volkers | Project Support
Hello everyone!
First off, we would like to wish you all a 2019 that is happy, healthy, peaceful, and full of light!
We celebrated the holidays on Lesvos with the residents of Kara Tepe and the Olive Grove, as well as the local Greek people. It was wonderful to see the two communities come together like this, and it has given us lots of energy and motivation to continue our work in 2019!
With the holidays, winter also arrived in Lesvos. We have had some very bad weather, and the rain, wind, and cold, made (and still make) our electricity provision challenging. On the one hand, residents spend more time in their homes and turn up the heating whilst they are inside, which makes the demand for our solar panels even higher than usual. On the other hand, the solar panels have a lower capacity because there are fewer sunshine hours in a day. But we are working extra hard to keep the electrical network running!
At the moment, we have 12 general solar panel stations in Kara Tepe. Here, these stations provide 260 families with energy 24 hours a day. This means they can light their homes and charge their phones whenever they need. We have additional stations – 20 in Kara Tepe, 10 in the Olive Grove South – to power the camps’ street lighting, so that people can still go to the bathroom even if it gets dark. The solar panels then, give the residents a sense of independence and security.
That is why it is incredibly important that we take good care of the solar panels. We do this together with our residents, who have been trained as part of a special electricity team. They are the embodiment of our larger philosophy: the refugee camp as a self-sustaining community managed by the residents themselves. We are hoping to keep fostering such a community by placing more solar panels in the future. We could then provide every home in Kara Tepe and the Olive Grove South with its own solar panel, and have the panel not only light, but heat the homes of our residents too. For that, we continue to need your support!
Our solar panels are powered by your donations, so on behalf of us and all the residents of Kara Tepe and the Olive Grove South, thank you!
Team Movement on the Ground
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