The Namibian Solar Bottle Project Hendrik Ehlers

IN Namibia four shacks burn down every week. Shacks lit with candles and kerosene lamps. Shacks lined with clothing. Shacks filled with children who don’t want to sit in the dark to do their homework, make their lunch or wait for their parents who will return in the dark to the dark.

Hendrik Ehlers is passionate about saving lives.

Forced to serve in the German army and after travelling the world to see it rife with social injustice, Ehlers found himself on an island in the Amazon where he met an excommunicated Jesuit priest single-handedly supporting over ten thousand people.

Though the horror of the war and the world sent him on diverse adventures including spending two years crossing the Sudanese desert on a horse which had a name and hand gliding along the Gibraltar stretch, one night in the Amazon, while watching the first wave of attacks on Kuwait in the home of the Jesuit priest, Ehlers had an epiphany.

Suddenly he realised that he was chosen.

That he was not born to be the first man to cycle to the moon but to be the catcher in the rye and put all he had into protecting people. He first did this by moving to Angola and clearing land mines but many years later when life had sent him to Namibia, he learnt about the children being burnt alive in shacks in the informal settlements.

And he tried to find a solution.

This came in the form of an invention by a Brazilian man named Alfred Moser, who became so frustrated with the power cuts in his own country, that he invented a light source that was no more than a bottle filled with water stuck in a hole in the roof.

The part outside collected sunshine and the part inside illuminated the room below.

Today it is a wonderful technology used all over world, particularly by people who live in close shacks.

“I did not invent this but I saw the potential to use it to diminish shack fires and child victims,” says Ehlers.

To do this, he sought partnerships with local banks and communication giants to spread the word and sponsor demo units but despite initial interest, this came to nothing.

This until Woermann Brock’s ‘We Care Trust’ heard him out and helped him to build a shack- on-wheels that he and the Uyelele team take to workers meetings, fairs and schools to show the public how simple and safe it can be to light shacks during the daytime. His wife, Lize Ehlers, even wrote ‘Uyelele’, a song that acts as a manual so people know how to build the light source.

Today Ehlers has teamed up with the Municipality Disaster Prevention Team which includes firemen, policemen, health and social workers as well as the Uyelele team and together they visit informal settlements and people learn how to check that their gas bottles are not leaking, the importance of hand washing, they learn to leave spaces between shacks so fire engines can pass through and they also learn the number for the fire brigade.

Oddly, the solution is so simple, many find it unbelievable so do not easily adopt it and remain at risk of shack fires so Ehlers says this is what we can do:

“Print out the installation manual from the Uyelele website, don’t wait for government or whoever else.” Buy a bottle or a battery charged lantern, give it someone who needs it – your gardener or domestic helper.

“Give this out, people install it and you save lives and create a brighter future for our children.”

Download the manual and read more at www.uyelele.org and watch the full TEDx

Windhoek Talk on YouTube.

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