I.O.U. — This is a preliminary version of a page that will be further developed later, maybe in mid-2014, and there will be more than one "service to the poor" page. This main-page will explain the biblical basis (as in these passages) and general principles, share a few stories and describe projects. Currently a few links are below, about activities by ASA people, followed by a description of symposia at the annual meetings of ASA in 2005, 2006, and 2007 (plus reports about these meetings in the ASA Newsletter) plus links to the corresponding talk-abstracts later in this page. Later there will also be links from each of these topics to pages describing the topic in more detail, and a page with all "stewardship of life" abstracts (about a wide variety of topics, including ministry to the poor) from the meetings in 2005-2008.
Other
conference themes — such as energy (conserving it and finding alternative
sources)
in 2005 — will be covered in other pages, and a much wider range of topics
is in the homepage for Christian Stewardship.
Some Service Activities by ASA Members
• What can we do with coconuts? You can find out from Walter Bradley (who is on the executive council of ASA) and in articles by Jody Long & inventors conference (re: a 3-month question) & E-Team Summary & Amanda Lewis. { abstracts in this page: 1 2 }
• Martin Price, a former president of ASA, describes the vision of ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization) as "bringing glory to God and a blessing to mankind by using science and technology to help the poor." Their goal is "to improve the capacity and capability of international community development workers by networking their skills and knowledge with each other. … ECHO exists for one major reason, to help those working internationally with the poor be more effective, especially in the area of agriculture! We are a technical support organization helping community development organizations and workers do what they do . . . better!" From their homepage you can explore their Core Services (Problem Solving & Networking,…), a fascinating history of Martin Price in About Us, a virtual tour of six Global Farms (Tropical Highlands, Urban Rooftop,… *), ways to Get Involved, and more. * "ECHO has designed their station to recreate as many distinct tropical ecosystems as is practical in south Florida. Diverse tropical crops, forages and fruit trees fill most of the land. This setting enabled hands-on labs in tropical fruit pruning, grafting, erosion control, agroforestry, basic animal husbandry, and other practical areas." (from a description of an ECHO-class offered by the AuSable Institute) { abstracts in this page: 1 2 }
• The ASA Newsletter, describing part of our meeting in 2000: "The second plenary speaker Saturday evening was Susan Drake Emmerich, a Christian anthropologist, who became involved in Tangier Island, a closed island subculture. Tangier Island is located in the Chesapeake Bay with a population of about eight hundred people. Susan spoke of the way in which she was able to become accepted by the Tangier fishing community. The watermen would indiscriminately pollute the bay with trash and oil. Susan convinced them to enter into a covenant to preserve the bay by changing their waste disposal habits. She did this by appealing to their already-established beliefs, connecting in their minds their faith in Jesus (their Pilot on the water) with their caring for his creation. She lived on Tangier Island for longer than the two years that most outsiders previously had been able to persist." You can learn more about this fascinating story in her own words and from NOAA Coastal Services.
• Below, you can read summaries about some of the work being done by
ASA members.
More about Service Activities by ASA Members
(described in excerpts, from ASA Newsletters, about our meetings in
2005-2007)
Technology for Shalom [ASA-2005]
Every day the equivalent of 20 jumbo jets full of children
die from diseases. Most of these 6,000 deaths could be prevented by providing
sources of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. U of Wisconsin
civil and environmental engineering prof Peter Bosscher used those facts
to make his case that the developing world needs engineers more than doctors.
Speaking [at the annual meeting of ASA in 2005] on the topic “Technology
for Shalom,” he bolstered his case by pointing out that the average African
woman walks 6 km to get fresh water, another six to return, carrying a 20 kg
water load. In the developing world, the average person uses 10 liters
of water per day—their full day’s water use for washing, eating,
drinking and cooking. That’s the equivalent of one standard American
toilet flush [Ed. note: This would be slightly more than two flushes of a 1.28-gallon
high-efficiency toilet].
Cooperating with Engineers without Borders, Bosscher sends
engineering students to implement low-tech/highimpact projects like potable water
sources or sanitation
facilities. Some organizations send university students on overseas projects
with goals merely to have a good time and to return safely. But when his
students
engage in humanitarian outreach, “Engineering has a human face. No
longer
is it just calculations and mechanics and calculus.” When they see their
engineering expertise help people, many of them make it their life’s career.
He quoted Bernard Amadei, founding president of Engineers
without Borders-USA,
who said: “Improving the lives of the 5 billion people
whose chief concern is to stay alive another day on our planet is no longer an
option; it is an
obligation.” (more) { Peter
Bosscher passed away in November 2007, leaving behind a productive legacy and
many people who loved him and were inspired by him. }
A solar cooker is very appropriate for underdeveloped countries. Physicist Paul
Arveson pointed out that many countries have relied so much on burning wood,
that they have depleted trees, habitat, soil and watershed. Cooking smoke
kills over 1.6 million people each year, causing acute lower respiratory infection,
chronic bronchitis, lung cancer, etc. Many poor families spend 25% of their
income on fuel. The Cookit, a solar cooker that uses aluminum foil or metallized
plastic
film to collect and concentrate the sun’s rays, consumes no fuel, eliminates
the daily search for firewood, provides business opportunities, and can sterilize
water and pasteurize milk. (more)
Bradley Aspires to Be “George
Washington Carver
of Coconuts”
Baylor U. professor and ASA Council member Walter Bradley champions
using technology
in creative ways to help the poor.
In Papua New Guinea he has implemented that goal by converting
coconuts into value-added products. Realizing that extracting milk from
the coconut
produced
substantial waste, he resolved “to become for coconuts what George Washington
Carver had become for peanuts.”
He and associates discovered the various parts could be
used:
as fuel, for chip-burning cook stoves and for biodiesel;
as animal feed, containing 16% protein and all essential
amino acids;
in construction, processed into particle board;
in ecology, as matting to minimize erosion;
in the household, as cooking oil, glycerin for soap, and the empty shell as a
cup.
Making it even more suitable for developing countries, coconuts
grow primarily
in soil that is sandy and near coastlines — the very areas where poverty
and drought are most intense.
Each tree can bear continually, producing two to four crops
per year, and an experienced climber can harvest about 1,000 coconuts per day. That
sounds like
an ideally “appropriate” solution for developing countries! (more)
Science
and Technology
in Service to the Poor [ASA-2006]
One track [at the annual meeting of ASA in 2006] devoted
most
of
Saturday
to
the
theme “Science and Technology in Service to the Poor.”
Martin Price led off with the perspective of his
ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization) group, stating that
its goal is “to bring glory to God and a blessing to mankind by using
science and technology to help the poor.”
He said that if results are to reach the poor, an item generally
must cost the recipient nothing or almost nothing. Exceptions are: (A)
if the goal is to develop something you hope generous benefactors will pay to
make available, e.g., HIV/AIDS drugs, (B) new technology becomes the basis
for local micro-enterprises that generate employment, e.g., coconut processing
or (C) it is of help to organizations that will use it in ministry, e.g.,
test strips for malaria.
He recommended four online informational resources:
1. ECHO publication Using Science to Help the Poor: Low-Budget
Research Ideas - available as a PDF file at www.echotech.org.
2. Trees for Life Journal - www.TFLJournal.org
3. International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering
- www.engr.psu.edu/IJSLE/home.html
4. A document with specific research ideas - http://echotech.org/mambo/docman/usingsci.pdf
(more)
Doctors in impoverished regions of the world often have medicines available to them, but no reliable way to diagnose a patient’s illness. The problem is especially acute in areas that lack electricity, refrigeration, and running water. Malaria kills 3,000 people daily, 75% of them under age 5. In her presentation, “Using Immunoassays to Create Affordable Diagnostics,” Alynne MacLean described a simple diagnostic test that costs less than $1 per patient, now being used in several countries. (abstract)
Francis Collins related an experience of diagnosing a lethal condition he had never seen before, and treating it “with his heart in his mouth” by surgical intervention with improvised equipment in Nigeria. (abstract)
Other participants in this track shared success stories — converting coconuts into renewable energy and other value-added products, anti-malarial activity of two varieties of papaya, antibacterial properties of several compounds extracted from Moringa oleifera seeds, using velvet bean as food and feed, and achieving sustainable health benefits for community water systems. (there will be more about these later, in another page)
Science and Appropriate
Technology for the Developing World [ASA-2007]
{note: the ASA Newsletter for
the 2007 meeting has not yet been published, so the description below is
from the meeting program}
Over four billion of the Earth's people live in
poverty, usually experiencing a significant reduction in quality of life and
life expectancy. Science and technology have much to offer to improve
nutrition through better agricultural practices, access to clean water and
sanitation, sources of suitable energy, more efficient means of producing goods,
production of better housing, and delivery of better healthcare. As followers
of Christ, we have a special challenge to help meet the needs of persons who
are poor. Papers in this symposium will
focus on ways in which science and technology can be applied simply and
economically to help meet these needs,
the Christian values that
motivate us to make this a priority, and the fruits of such work.
Session Coordinators [for this symposium at the 2007 joint
meeting of American Scientific Affiliation (in U.S.) and Christians
in Science (in U.K.)] were Ruth
Douglas Miller (Kansas State University) and Walter
Bradley (Baylor University).
ABSTRACTS (for talks, described
above, at meetings of ASA in 2005-2006)
(abstracts for other talks are in another page)
Sustainable Solutions for Rwanda: A Case Study — Peter
J Bosscher [in 2005]
Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa and
also one of the poorest. The community of Muramba is representative of
Rwanda in that the most basic problem facing people is the lack of potable water
and available energy sources. Children and adults spend hours every day
retrieving dirty water from an outdated gravity-fed
system. Tests on the water quality have indicated the presence of coliform
and
E. coli. Frequent illness is associated with the unclean drinking water
that
the community is unable to purify.
The Engineers Without Borders organization at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison traveled to Muramba to assess, design, and implement strategies
for improving the quantity/quality of water and identifying alternatives to harvesting
firewood
which has led to deforestation and soil erosion. The goal is to train local
experts to implement sustainable solutions which can be maintained and duplicated
in
other regions of Rwanda. This paper will describe our experience with this
effort.
The Kingdom and Sustainability Principles — Peter
Bosscher [in 2006]
Sustainability is slowly but surely finding its way into
university curricula. In engineering education, an overview of the progress
from 1992 to 1997 is contained in the report, The Engineer’s Response
to Sustainable Development, dated February 1997, and published by World Federation
of Engineering Organizations (WFEO). In the US many engineering colleges
have developed extensive programs with special courses on the environment and
sustainable technologies. Internationally, other institutions have also
integrated these concepts into their courses.
Is the topic of sustainability morally neutral? Can
the principles embedded in sustainability be arrived at from multiple worldviews? How
should a Christian respond to the motivations for sustainability? Is sustainability
a Kingdom value? This paper explores the principles of sustainability from
several worldview perspectives and finds some worldviews are notably silent on
sustainability while others speak loudly.
I'll find the abstract for Paul Arveson later, but a summary of his talk is
now available in PowerPoint or HTML.
Converting Coconuts into Value-added Products for Developing
Countries — Sarah Gibson, Lindsey Mack, Walter L Bradley [in 2005]
The coconut is a very abundant renewable resource in the
very parts of the world that are most underdeveloped. Coconut palm will
produce batches of coconuts every three months or four batches per year for seventy
of the eighty years of their lives. We believe that coconuts can be converted
into electric power, food for pigs and chickens, particle board for housing,
filters for water, and fuel for cooking.
The challenge is to convert coconuts into these basic human
needs of energy, clean water, food, and housing using technology that is inexpensive
and sufficiently simple that it can be used and maintained by rural villagers.
Converting Coconuts into Renewable Energy and Other Value-Added
Products in Developing Countries — Howard Huang, Jason Poel, and Walter
Bradley [in 2006]
Cocos nucifera trees, otherwise known as coconut trees,
grow abundantly along the coast line of countries within 20 of the equator, since
they prosper in sandy soil and salt water. A single coconut tree will produce
more than 120 watermelon-sized husks per year, each with a coconut imbedded inside. There
are three constituents of the Cocos nucifera that can be used for fuel; the
husk, the coconut shell, and the coconut oil that is in the white coconut “meat,” or
copra as it is usually called. Thus, the coconut tree is a very abundant,
renewable resource for energy.
We have been investigating the production of energy from
these three constituents of coconuts.
1. The white inside of the coconut, called the coconut meat
or coconut flesh, can be removed from the shell and subsequently squeezed to
expel the coconut oil. It takes about 10 coconuts to make one liter of
coconut oil. The coconut oil can be processed using lye as a catalyst and
methanol as a reactant to convert the coconut oil into a bio-diesel fuel, with
a processing cost of $0.69/gallon. The coconut bio-diesel has been found
to run very nicely in a diesel generator, allowing the conversion of coconut
oil into electricity.
2. The coconut shell has a specific gravity of 1.2, which
is very dense compared to hard woods which usually have a specific gravity of
0.6 and soft woods which are between 0.2 and 0.4. This much greater density
suggests that the coconut shell should have a greater density of energy as well,
which it does. Ten kilograms of coconut shell produces 3 kg of charcoal
and 5.5 kg of combustible gases, giving a remarkably high yield of fuel compared
to wood, which typically gives only 1 kg of charcoal from 10 kg of wood.
3. The coconut husk can also be used as a fuel. It
can be processed in a biomass system where it is converted to combustible gases
that are then used in a gas turbine to generate both electricity and heat for
warming homes or offices and for making hot water. One coconut husk can
be used to make about 0.25 kW of electricity.
In this paper, both the technical details of the conversion
of the three constituents of Cocos nucifera into various fuels will be presented
along with an economic analysis of the feasibility of using Cocos nucifera as
the primary source of renewable energy for rural villages.
The hardness of the coconut shell also makes it a likely
additive for stiffening and strengthening engineering plastics as a filler. Grinding
it into suitable fine particles is required to make this possible. Recent
results from our labs will be presented.
The husk can also be pressed in to excellent particle board,
with the pith acting as a polymer matrix and the fibers acting as the reinforcing
agent. Recent results from our lab for this process will also be presented. {soon
there will be links to more about the possibilities for using coconuts}
Using Science and Technology in
Service to the Poor: Where
Does One Begin? — Martin
Price [in 2006]
We have been unbelievably blessed in our personal and national
lives by benefits brought to us by advances in science and technology. Most of
these benefits
become
available to us because we, our parents, or our government spend considerable
amounts of money. What would research in science and technology look like if
the goal was to help the extremely poor, especially in underdeveloped countries? What can I as a scientist or engineer develop that a person earning a few hundred
dollars a year could take advantage of? The bottom line is that the result
of
our work must be something that costs almost nothing to the end user.
This talk will give brief examples of several research efforts
(or research opportunities) that meet this criterion. The talks to follow
in
this symposium will give concrete
examples of scientists and engineers who are already involved in just this kind
of work.
Called to Care: For the Poor, the Earth, and the Great
Commission — Martin L Price [in 2005]
In this slide-illustrated talk, I explore briefly whether
there is a food shortage or food surplus, discuss what kind of problems missionaries
encounter when they want to help small farmers, give examples of technical questions
missionaries have asked, talk about some of the most interesting underutilized
plants in our seedbank and show pictures of methods used to grow gardens in light-weight
beds above the ground on pavement or rooftops using recycled or waste materials. I conclude with some personal challenges. Calling and career opportunities are
also a theme.
more: You can explore the website of ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization) and the story (told by Martin Price, its founder) of how ECHO began its global ministry.
Using Immunoassays
to Create Affordable Diagnostics — Alynne MacLean [in 2006]
In the poorest regions of the developing world, there is often no electricity
or refrigeration, and no running water. Lack of these basic amenities makes
diagnosing diseases very difficult. Daily, people are dying from preventable
diseases due to not being diagnosed. A number of years ago, the lack of diagnostics
was less of an issue—simply because doctors did not have medicine to
dispense even if a patient was properly diagnosed. Now, there is a new situation
arising. There are medical professionals with medicine, but without an adequate
means to know who needs which medicine.
Within the US, the majority of tests to diagnose diseases require expensive equipment,
electricity, trained technicians to run the equipment, and maintenance personnel
to repair the equipment and replace worn parts, etc. Hence, we cannot simply “transplant” typical
US technology to the developing world. This is why we need an appropriate new
technology brought to these regions for diagnostics.
An appropriate diagnostic is one that is affordable, does not require refrigeration
or electricity, can withstand heat and humidity, and can be performed quickly. Immunoassays can meet all of these needs.
This talk will take you through the development of a rapid diagnostic test for
malaria. Every single day, more than 3,000 people die from malaria—and
75% of those who die are children under the age of five. According to the World
Health Organization, “a prompt and accurate diagnosis is the key to effective
disease management in malaria patients.”
Each aspect of the diagnostic test will be discussed: from production of polyclonal
and monoclonal antibodies, conjugation of antibodies to dyed latex micro particles,
and striping antibodies on membranes, to preparing sample and conjugate release
pads.
At the end of the talk, we will to see how these tests are being used in the
Himalayan Mountains of Nepal in Community Health Evangelism efforts, in Mexico
by mobile medical teams, in a hospital in Haiti, and in clinics in the Democratic
Republic of Congo.
Learning About Life and God in West Africa — Francis
Collins [in 2006]
Following a longstanding urge to do more for the developing world, I have volunteered
on two occasions to serve as a physician in a Christian mission hospital in
the delta area of Nigeria. To add to the significance of the experience, I
was accompanied both times by my daughter, who has subsequently gone on to
become a practicing physician. The experience was exhausting, terrifying, and
life-changing.
Faced with overwhelming poverty and medical needs in the clinic and hospital,
separated from my familiar environment of high-tech medicine, and challenged
by the need to diagnose and treat tropical diseases I had never seen before,
with little to go on except my hands, eyes, and ears, I was forced to lean on
God and not my own inadequate abilities. Looking around me, I learned to appreciate
the incredible blessings that I had taken for granted in living in a country
of great abundance. But I also was sobered and inspired by the courage and spiritual
strength of the Christian Nigerians I spent time with— they seemed to have
so little, and yet their abiding trust in God put my own to shame. In one particular
instance, an encounter with a critically ill Nigerian farmer who had come to
seek my care left me with an unforgettable lesson about God’s love.
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