Some background to my Baking

peek - Portable eye examination kit project

While we are in Kenya we will be making a short film ( on a charitable basis, not as paid work) to support the Peek project. Peek is a mobile phone application created by Dr Andrew Bastawrous of the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which can possibly revolutionise the process of diagnosis and treatment of eye disease in rural Africa.   The application can be used by fieldworkers to help examine the eye, take an image of the retina and then send the images and the geo-location of the patient to the local treatment centre, so helping eye specialists reach more people and treat them for their eye problems.

One of the issues is that local people don’t necessarily trust the process. Hardly surprising when you see how cataracts have been treated in the past with a sharp stick wielded by a traveling ‘expert’.  These ‘operations’ often ended up with a more serious eye infection and irreversible damage rather than the amazing sight recovery that can be achieved with a cataract removal and lens replacement. For more details about Peek take a look at www.supportpeek.com where you can even buy and donate one of the phone adaptor kits.

So why Baking

The baking angle comes about because Andrew, his wife Madeline and young son spent many months in Kenya while Andrew and a small team were trialling Peek in 100 villages. Every time they completed another village trial, Madeline, ably assisted by her four year old, baked a different cake or bread to welcome them back. Her baking became so popular that the idea of baking and selling was hatched. Now a local bakery and café is being developed in Ujima on a social enterprise model. Its profits will provide funds for eye operations and the business will help promote healthy baking products and give local people new skills and employment. A team from the E5 Bakery in Hackney, London, is supporting the set up of the bakery and some funds from a TED/Mazda grant are being used to support the physical developments. For more info on the bakery see Madeline’s blog.

So, in support of this initiative I am looking into community bakeries as we travel and pledging to bake a cake in our camp oven in every country we visit. So far the discovery of community bakeries has been far more successful than my actual baking! My blog entries on baking and bakeries will track my progress and I hope provide connections between the various bakery projects since the managers of these social enterprises seem keen to learn from each other.