Peace Corps volunteer cooks up a sunny plan

Paraguayan village could benefit from Tara Moomey’s challenge

By Christina Lent

The Beaverton Valley Times, Jan 25, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Beaverton’s Tara Moomey hopes to show women in Paraguay the benefits of using solar ovens. She and her father built this prototype in just a few hours.

Jaime Valdez / Times Newspapers

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Tara Moomey is the first one to admit that building things is a challenge.

But she will have to construct a solar oven from scratch and use her creation to slow-cook a meal if she wants to convince women in the Paraguayan village of San Javier that solar cooking is a viable option.

“I’m going to have to prove that it works,” Tara said.

To prepare for the mission ahead of her, the 24-year-old Peace Corps volunteer turned her two-week trip home into a working vacation and enlisted the aid of her parents.

While her mother Sherrie searched the Web for solar cooking recipes, Tara and her father Randy tackled the challenge of building a prototype.

Armed with three sets of Internet instructions, cardboard boxes, a roll of tin foil, glue, tape, a plastic cooking bag and black paint, father and daughter spent a couple hours building their prototype solar oven on the kitchen floor of their Beaverton home.

“It was a puzzle putting this thing together,” Tara admitted as she showed off the family homework assignment. “It took us a while to find two boxes that fit together right.

“Now we have to test it.”

With last week’s blustery winter weather conditions, a test run of the oven had to be postponed.

The Moomey family will have to select a recipe, prepare a dish and send a review of the solar oven’s performance to Tara, who returned Monday to Paraguay for the second year of her commitment to the Peace Corps.

If the oven works as it should to harness the sun’s energy to cook the food, then Tara will use the notes and photos she took while creating the prototype with her father to build a second oven on her own with materials she gathers in Paraguay.

“Now that we’ve been able to build one, I’m more confident than when I left Paraguay,” Tara said. “I feel really good about it now.”