Janice Kamenir-Reznik is one practical women. She is a retired environmental lawyer who works tirelessly for human rights.

“I’m a very pragmatic activist,” Janice says. “Just pondering ideas is not my thing.” When asked to help the refugees in Darfur, Janice and her rabbi, Harold Schulweis, organized a meeting for all of the synagogue leaders in Los Angeles. They knew that women were threatened with rape and abuse whenever they ventured outside of their settlements for firewood. Their organization, JWW (Jewish World Watch), dedicated itself to the cause.

“The price they had to pay for feeding their families was rape,” says Janice. “That just seemed outrageous.”

One of the members of the groups suggested supplying the camps with solar cookers, which were inexpensive and easy to assemble. While they didn’t cook as quickly as an open fire, most didn’t mind the extra time for their own personal safety.

“I no longer need to go to the bush for firewood,” one woman told Kamenir-Reznik. “The wood that used to last me a week now lasts me a month, and because there is no smoke, it is very clean and the food tastes better.”
The Solar Cooker Project has made its way into Chad’s Touloum and Oure Cassoni camps in 2007. To date, Janice’s organization has raised more than $1.6 million across the United States and distributed more than 25,000 cookers.

As Janice puts it:

“Until we started this organization, I believed that Darfur was a faraway problem, one that I couldn’t fix. But now nobody can say that there’s nothing we can do about it.

Rachel Andres of the Solar Cooker Project