By Michelle Riley | Director of External Affairs
Standing in his embassy office in Washington, The Honorable James Kimonyo was smiling broadly, his eyes twinkling with delight as he held a Lifelight for the first time. “Light is needed in every situation in Rwanda,” he told us. “People go to bed at 7:00 p.m. for lack of light!”
The Rwandan Ambassador to the United States praised the many applications of the Lifelight, from helping community health workers administer home-based care at night to preventing fires in grass-thatched homes, but his primary focus was on the children.
“Children breathe in toxic fumes and damage their eyes when they study to kerosene lamps and candles,” he said. Painting a verbal picture of how four or five children typically gather around a tin kerosene wick lamp, Mr. Kimonyo continued: “Their eyes are only centimeters from the flame, and as their lowered heads trap the toxic fumes inside the circle, they inhale all of the smoke as they try to read.”
Forty-nine percent of Rwanda’s population is under 14 years old, and there are an estimated 400,000 orphans in the country. As Ambassador Kimonyo states, “Our children will never become properly educated if they can only read under these unhealthy conditions. They must be able to undertake more than a few hours of night-time reading each week.”
Shaking the hand of Lifeline Energy CEO Kristine Pearson, Ambassador Kimonyo concluded our meeting with his strong support. “Lifeline Energy has worked in Rwanda for more than ten years, and we embrace your forward-thinking efforts to address the energy needs of rural Africans. I fully support your pledge to provide lights to our orphaned children."
The Lifelight will be on display at September’s annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, as part of our efforts to raise funds and visibility for our lighting efforts in Rwanda.
_______________________________________________________________ FREEPLAY FOUNDATION IS NOW KNOWN AS LIFELINE ENERGY:
We are delighted to announce that in April, we changed our name to Lifeline Energy.
Operating as Freeplay Foundation has served us well for the past 11 years. However, we feel that our new name better reflects our wider mission to tackle energy poverty head-on for the poorest and most vulnerable.
In addition to including Lifeline radios and Lifelights in projects and programs, in the near future Lifeline Energy will launch a brand new, revolutionary communications tool that we believe will have a profound impact on education and information access in the developing world. We will send you more news about this soon.
We will continue to focus our research on the impact of dangerous kerosene, firewood and candles, and the harmful effects these have on vulnerable women and children. This better equips us to create clean energy products and to advocate approaches that reduce usage of toxic fuels and improve quality of life.
Lifeline Energy remains a 501 (c)(3) registered charity in the USA, a registered charity in the UK and is a Section 18A and 21 non-profit in South Africa. Please visit our redesigned website and learn more about Lifeline Energy; www.lifelineenergy.org. All email addresses that were formerly "@freeplayfoundation.org" now will be "@lifelineenergy.org."
Thank you for your continued support.
By Bhavna Malkani | Digital Fundraising and Marketing Manager
By Bhavna Malkani | Digital Marketing and Fundraising Manager
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