An Engineer’s Darfur Journal – Part IV – IDP Training
A group of eight assembly workers arrived right at 9am on the first day of training. Now that the SAG staff is comfortable with the shop tools and stove assembly, I was confident that we could effectively teach those skills to our new trainees. Before I arrived in El Fasher, SAG and Oxfam America had met with the leaders of Al Salam camp to arrange for the training of up to 40 workers for employment at the stove workshop. Jobs are scarce in these camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who have been forced from their homes by conflicts in the region. One of the benefits of building the stoves in Darfur is that we can create livelihood opportunities for some of the families who will be using the stove; hopefully the workers will enjoy the work and their wages will help improve their families’ quality of life.
The first group of trainees was eager to begin learning about the stove. After a brief introduction to the workshop and the Darfur Stoves Project, everyone got a chance to inspect a completed stove up close. During the morning, I built a stove from start to finish so that everybody would be familiar with all the steps. After breakfast (we usually eat around 11am), the trainees broke up into teams of two or three and built their own. I had never wished more that I was fluent in Arabic! Most of my colleagues at both Oxfam and SAG speak English, so up to this point I have only learned a few key words and phrases in Arabic. I would love to be able to communicate directly with the trainees from the camp, however, to ask them what they think about the stove and the production process. One of the trainees (the only one who spoke English) told me that he minored in English at his university and wanted to draft a letter to President Obama. Regardless of any communication issues, the eight workers quickly learned how to bend sheet metal, attach stove pieces together with rivet guns, and identify solutions to common problems. The most frequent issue so far has been loose clips or rivets, which is usually cured with a twist from some pliers or a redo of the joint. After three days of training, they were ready to receive their training certificates and begin the first production run of the stove in North Darfur.
Last week we were lucky to have a short visit from Ray Offenheiser and Mike Delaney, who traveled all the way from the Boston office of Oxfam America. They could only visit the SAG workshop over the weekend, when the assembly workers were absent, but were still impressed with the progress we have made. It was particularly satisfying to lead them into the storage room where over 100 gleaming Berkeley-Darfur Stoves  sat waiting to be distributed to families. I am always excited to talk to people about the project and the workshop, but showing Ray and Mike the results of our efforts was especially rewarding. With training almost complete, we are nearing the start of full production at the workshop and I am nearing the end of my time in Fasher. Barring any more obstacles, we are well on our way to establishing an efficient workshop that can build thousands of high-quality stoves for families in Darfur.
