Text by Natalya Savka | Photography by Lana Slezic
Welding a solar cooker.
7/11 
The women come to India's Barefoot
College from villages in Fiji, Peru, Rwanda, and beyond. They arrive
largely unschooled and leave six months later as solar engineers, ready
to electrify their worlds.
"Chai time." The tea is black, with lots of milk and sugar and a
pinch of ginger and cardamom. It's well caffeinated, to get the
students from Africa, South America, and Oceania through another
eight-hour workday in the dry heat of northern India. The teachers—all
locals—pour their chai into chipped cups hardly bigger than shot
glasses. The Fijians use metal cups, maybe 12 ounces each. The
Peruvians generally do not drink tea, because they suspect they are
getting bigger from lack of exercise. The two women from Benin take
their tea in quart-size, pink plastic pails originally intended for
bathing, and they each stir in three tablespoons of sugar.
Again, teacher Manna Sharma says, "Chai time." But Miriama
Moceiwasa, from Fiji, waves her off with a wire clipper, points to her
malfunctioning lantern, and, in her limited English, says, "Make
light."
There's a feeling of urgency in the classroom. Moceiwasa can sense
it in the way the teachers test, bundle, and pack up the solar lights
as soon as they're constructed. Over the past four days the students
have built more than 600 of them, but Moceiwasa guesses that there's
room in the boxes for more. Next week the lights will be shipped to the
Liberian villages of eight former students.
Moceiwasa strips red insulation off an end of an electrical wire.
Inside, there's another wire—thinner, copper, multi-stranded. Around
the copper, she twists a soldering wire, which she then melts with a
soldering iron to join the copper strands. She does the same with a
black wire, then holds up both wires. "Red, positive. Black, negative,"
she explains, and connects them to a circuit board. The melting metal
smells lousy, like burned hair spray.
I point to a resistor on a circuit board and ask her what it does.
She points to the same resistor and says, "It goes here."
Bahgwat Nandan, the coordinator of the solar program at the Barefoot
College, later says, "Why does the solar light work? What scientific
principles does it use? I still don't know. But it works."
Since 2004, the
Barefoot College,
in Tilonia, India, has trained about 250 illiterate and semiliterate
women from rural, unelectrified villages in 41 countries to be solar
engineers. After six months of training, these women have provided more
than 15,500 houses with solar electricity in their home countries. The
government of India covers all expenses—245,000 rupees (about $4,400)
per woman, plus airfare. The college has trained an additional 700 men
and women from rural India, including Moceiwasa's teachers.
The 34 students in Moceiwasa's class—all women—come from eight
countries and have 137 children between them. On average, each has
about six years of formal education. Seven of them can't read.
When she finally does take her tea, Moceiwasa brings it back to her
stool at the end of one of the long worktables in the cinder block
classroom. As she works, sweat rolls behind where her glasses meet her
ears. She hunches over. It's May, one of the hottest and driest months
in Tilonia. Today it is 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
Moceiwasa tests her light with a voltmeter, connecting a black wire
to a black wire and a red to a red. But the light does not turn on.
So she frowns, finishes her tea, points to my empty chai cup, and
says, "I take it, my daughter." Then she gets up and rinses my cup.
***
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