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Derk Rijks is a volunteer with the KoZon Foundation. He has worked extensively in the Darfur refugee camps in Chad with his organization, Tchad Solaire. Dr. Rijks is an engineer with Agrometeorological Applications Associates in France.

Recent news and developmentsEdit

May 2013: Derk Rijks, a volunteer with the KoZon Foundation, recently responded to Jewish World Watch with this note of appreciation. "Last week I was at the Touloum Refugee Camp. The chief of the workshop, Fatimé, told me there were new arrivals. We walked over to the last of the dunes and there was one woman who had just walked in with four kids, sitting in the sand. Her village was bombed one week ago, and she fled to escape the Janjaweed, walking for seven nights. Fatimé looked at me, I nodded " yes", and in the next few hours she had her cooker and started her solar cooker training, even before she had a shelter. No words needed, no paper needed. That is the way your contribution works." He also notes, In the six camps where we work in Chad, and in the villages of the population around the camps, about 29,000 families now do solar cooking, and about 130,000 persons are eating solar cooked meals. In this part of the world it works about 300 days a year. From the empty bags of the food shipped in by the World Food Programme, and the snippets of aluminum foil and cardboard left over from the manufacture of the cookers, the refugees make "thermos baskets" to keep the food, cooked between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., warm until the evening meal at 5 p.m. or 8 p.m. They do not have to search for wood so much any more and there are far fewer conflicts for that reason. As one of the elected representatives of the women refugees said: "Solar cooking brings us justice and peace".

Derk Rijks Agrometeorological Applications Associates
B.P. 102
F-01213 Ferney-Voltaire Cedex
France

Tel.: +33 450 40 88 41
Fax.: +33 450 40 88 42

Derk Rijks can be contacted also through Tchad Solaire.