ARTICLE - PORTA GRAD ON HAITI PROJECT

PORTA GRAD PART OF TEAM WORKING ON HAITI PROJECT
(State Journal Register) - By Rhys Saunders

A 2008 graduate of PORTA High School in Petersburg is helping Haitian children use solar power to charge their laptops, and hopefully, change their lives.

Simon Brauer, 21, is part of an Illinois Institute of Technology group that installs solar arrays to power children’s laptops in the impoverished country. Brauer, who studies psychology and sociology at the school in Chicago, said he became involved with IIT Empowering Haiti in August 2010.

Several years ago, One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit that provides computers to children in developing countries, teamed with the Inter-American Development Bank to provide Haiti with low-powered laptops designed for young people, Brauer said.

The need for energy-efficient laptops came in the wake of the 2010 Haitian earthquake, he said.

“Due both to the infrastructural realities in Haiti and the January 2010 earthquake which crumbled Port-au-Prince, most schools do not have the capability to power their laptops each day,” Brauer said, which essentially transformed the low-powered laptops into “green, plastic bricks.”

The IIT team decided to visit Haiti in January to learn how it could help.

Afterward, IIT students with backgrounds in architecture, engineering and natural and social sciences combined efforts to design an inexpensive and efficient way to power the laptops. The group hopes to install more solar arrays in December and eventually hand over the project to the Haitian government.

“We looked at four schools to see what would be required to install there,” Brauer said. “We talked to the administrators at the schools, and we came back with the information that we needed to move forward.”

The team spent the spring semester working on its design and raised money to help make the dream a reality, he said.

“Due to a wonderful response from the community, alumnae and organizations, we raised the money necessary to implement at our first school, which we did at the beginning of August,” Brauer said. “The design was a success, and the school is now able to charge 400 laptops at once.”

But providing such technology in developing countries comes with its own challenges, Brauer said.

“There have been reports of other projects going to Haiti and learning from this experience that they put it up, and then a week later, the kids didn’t know how fragile they were and threw rocks at them as a game,” he said.

The team hopes to visit Haiti again in December, and eventually turn the program over to the Haitian Ministry of Education, according to Laura Hosman, the social science professor who is leading the class and project.

“What really blew me away on the implementation trip was how incredibly well the IIT students performed on-site,” Hosman said. “They stepped up to perform tasks I didn’t know they could do — perhaps they didn’t know they could do until they got there.”

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Haiti facts

Population: 9,876,000 (2008)

National language: French, Creole

Per capita income: US $ 660/year (2008)

Life expectancy: 61 (2008)

% of population using improved drinking water sources: 58% (2006)

% of population using adequate sanitation facilities: 19% (2006)

Under 5 mortality rate: 72/1,000 live births (2008)

Formerly a French colony with a substantial slave population, an 1804 revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture made Haiti the first independent black republic. However, decades of poverty, environmental degradation, violence, instability and dictatorship have left it as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. These existing challenges were heightened significantly by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck in January 2010, killing more than 230,000 people and rendering over 1.6 million homeless.

Source: UNICEF: The State of the World's Children Report