Editors Note: This is one in a series of articles highlighting Rotary projects around the world.
The Louverture Cleary School, a 360-student secondary school near Port-au-Prince, has used solar power since 2005, but it lacked batteries capable of providing dependable energy. Kent Gilges, a member of the Rotary Club of Canandaigua, New York, saw this need while volunteering with his family at the school, which is run by education nonprofit the Haitian Project. “I was passing the dormitory,” Gilges recalls. “I looked in the window and there were 40 kids in one room, and they were all trying to study by one lightbulb.”
In late 2020, Gilges’ son and his son’s friend took up the effort to provide reliable power as a school capstone project, supported by the Canandaigua club as well as other clubs in District 7120 (New York) and the Rotary Club of St. Petersburg, Florida. The batteries, wiring, inverters, and other equipment were procured from a company operated by a Louverture Cleary graduate. “A big storm can blow through and they can still run their power needs for three days,” Gilges says.