Ken Goyer update

I have a huge apology to make. of you were inadvertently left off of my email list. This includes most of my friends in El Salvador, Turkey, Armenia and India, as well as many others. The first of this year when I left the country to go to Uganda I asked my brother, Warren, if he would manage my emails for me.

I asked him to help me because of the difficulty of sending multiple emails from dialup Internet connections from third world countries. I would send him an email and he would forward it to you from his high speed connection. Unfortunately, my lists were in disorder and many names did not get to him. I have just discovered this error and I have been working to straighten out the list. I am very grateful to Warren for helping me with this daunting email task.

This year I have sent out a number of emails chronicling my various stove building adventures. I have been to Uganda three times, as well as Darfur, Turkey, and Armenia. So I have spent most of the year on the road. In Uganda, our stove project in Lira is going very well. With ANCC we have made about 20,000 stoves in the Lira refugee camps, so far, and now this stove project will be supported by the International Lifeline Fund. The International Lifeline Fund has also successfully started a stove project, with my help, in the refugee camps in Darfur. Their ambition is to make 100,000 stoves in Lira and 100,000 stoves in Darfur. This frees me to start another project in north Uganda.

We have now taken 2,700 pictures of stoves built in Lira and financed by the East Fresno Rotary Club. Each picture includes five elements: the stove, the owner, her house, the number of the stove, and the flag of the East Fresno Rotary Club. It is really interesting (to me anyway) to see these pictures and realize that we really made all of those stoves, and the huge difference the stove project is already making in the lives of these people. The pictures also chronicle the lives and the living conditions in the IDP camps.

Also, we have had a huge success with the medical fund, alleviating much suffering and death.

I returned this year with Wilfred Pimentel to Turkey and Armenia to work with our Rotary Club three way stove projects, and to train a new batch of Peace Corps Volunteers in Armenia in the Rocket Stove, the Cookit solar cooker, and the insulated cooking box. We had a very good experience and we wish the best to these projects, and to a new Rotary Club stove project starting in Eastern Turkey.

But I am only half way through my story. The first of this year I started a new organization called AidAfrica. It is a legally incorporated 501(c)(3), non-profit charity. Our ambition is to start a new project in Gulu, Uganda. Gulu is the center of another one million internally displaced people in northern Uganda. The need here is equal to the need in Lira and in Darfur. Thousands of people suffer and die and I feel compelled to work here. We have hired four people to help us. Rosette lives in Jinja and will be the Administrative Secretary of AidAfrica. In addition, she has started an orphanage that we are helping to support. Freda, Priscilla, and Martin, our field staff, have moved to Gulu and will do many projects, as well as provide support to volunteers. In a week, Hugh will be AidAfrica's first volunteer to go to Uganda. Hugh has just been accepted as a medical student into Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel (in conjunction with Columbia) and he will start med school next fall. But in the meantime, he will start our medical project in Gulu. As well as saving babies from MAD, Hugh is interested in curing malaria. He has done research on a plant that comes from Asia that produces the anti-malarial drug artemisinin. This plant is in worldwide short supply and Hugh hopes to start a nursery and to introduce this plant into Northern Uganda. (We also plan to start a reforestation project.) After the first of the year a succession of volunteers (including myself) will join Hugh to work with him on the medical project as well as start a new stove project. Damon will visit for a few weeks and make twenty industrial sized stoves for comparison testing. It looks like we are off to an exciting year!

I apologize again for the information that you didn't get. Much of it can be found on the Internet. Doing a Google search of ken goyer, aiduganda, or sixbricks rocket stoves, will find most of the information about my work. I do hope to get a new website up soon and keep things posted there. The chronicle about Darfur is best seen here.

I want to say thanks to everyone that has made this project possible. Without your support and help it would have never happened. I look forward to our new project in Gulu and another fruitful year.

Best regards,

Ken Goyer