“Whether it’s a hurricane or a war zone, the children are very traumatized,” she says. “For the rest of their lives, these kids are incredibly traumatized. Imagine losing your home from a hurricane or losing parents because of a disaster or losing your whole family because they were shot and killed in front of you. These are the kids that I meet. Some of them were amazing to actually meet because I found so much joy, gratitude, perseverance and forgiveness.”
Every day we are invited to do something new. It might be something that scares us or makes us uncomfortable. We have a choice. We can say no and stay in our comfort zone or we can discover something new about ourselves and the world.
“In Ukraine, people were really struggling and they’re trying to thrive,” Chun says. “They had blackouts. You know, getting off the train it was so dark. I was just really struck by how dark it was in the streets because all you had were the cars. The streetlights were really very, very minimal. And the buildings were all dark.”
She plans to go back to some of the villages and deliver more lights.
“I think more continuous power is going into the major cities but the villages on the front line are completely decimated,” she says. “There are still many families that need help. In Türkiye, what I understand is happening through my research is, and also from my experience with the earthquake in Haiti, is that people don’t want to live in their homes even if they’re still there around the epicentre because if your home has a crack in it and there’s another tremor that house could go.”
Children and women are the most vulnerable after a disaster, Chun says. By bringing light into tent camps, she hopes to reduce sexual assaults and human trafficking. According to the United Nations, human trafficking is a massive problem, with estimates ranging as high as 50 million people worldwide. Wars and conflicts, such as the crisis in Ukraine, increase the possibility of trafficking in and outside of conflict areas. To make her case, Chun found a research paper where proper lighting decreased sexual assaults by 20% to 30% in Haiti.
“Imagine being a child,” she says. “You’ve lost your parents. You don’t know where to go. That’s when human trafficking comes to light. In the tent camps, the women get assaulted because they’re in a tent, and then there are public bathrooms and when they go to the bathroom at night they get assaulted. If there’s no light you can’t point your finger at an attacker because you can’t see your attacker at night. That’s also the reason why I want to go immediately.”
With more and more people going solar every year, the future of solar energy looks bright. But do you happen to know anything about its past? Who do we thank for the eco-friendliest invention providing our homes with electricity? Let’s dive into the history of solar energy: who invented solar panels?
Does solar power seem to you like a modern invention? Not that it isn’t innovative, but it may be older than you might have realized. Even people living in the 7th century B.C. knew how to use it. They combined the heat coming from the sun with a magnifying glass to get the fire needed for cooking.
But the history of solar panels dates back to 19th-century France. It starts with physicist Edmond Becquerel and his discovery of the photovoltaic effect.
So, what is the photovoltaic effect, you ask? That’s a fancy word for the creation of voltage and electricity by the material exposed to light. In other words, it’s the basic principle upon which all solar panels work. This discovery slowly made many other scientists curious about its effects.
Soon enough, they started using it to make their own solar-powered patents. The first among them was the work of French mathematician Augustin Mouchot. In the 1860s, he registered his engines that produced solar power. By 1888, there were a couple of other similar machines all over the world.
You already know that solar panels are made up of tiny units called solar cells. In 1888, Russian scientist Aleksandr Stoletov invented the first photoelectric solar cell. This photoelectric effect is closely related to the photovoltaic effect. And the first person to observe it was German physicist Heinrich Hertz.