Stoves with a little side of salsa…

Well, it’s quite possible that I have now officially lost all of my blog fans. After all of the AMAZING comments from last post, what did I do?? Blew you all off for an entire week! Well, if there are any of you still out there reading this, I promise this will be a good one. And I promise to be better about updating more often! But as you’ll see from this entry, it has been a crazy, rainy, exhausting, exhilirating and just plain INSANE week.

So I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before in the blog or to any of you but for my last week in Guatemala, rather than teaching, I was working on a stove project. Next logical question...what is a stove project?? Let me explain...

In the community where I teach, Santa Maria de Jesus, the living conditions are really pretty bad. Our students usually live in nothing more than a one room square hut made of reeds. They sleep, eat, cook, clean...everything in what is nothing bigger than a manager’s cube at General Mills. (and for any of you Mills people reading this, you know that is not a big place!)

Ok, so imagine that in this tiny one room there are several kids and often a few adult family members sleeping in the same room as an open fire stove that is burning constantly. The smoke inhalation is not only dangerous, but often very deadly. Smoke inhalation has killed some, shortened many lives and makes many of our students sick on a regular basis.

Well...enter the stove project! The stove project builds a stove in the house that is essentially no more than a brick box, a stove top and a chimney to let the smoke out of the house. It is still a wood burning stove but it uses 90% less wood (good for the family in terms of money savings and also a huge benefit to the environment) and nearly eliminates all the smoke within the house’s tiny walls.

Alright, so now that you understand what the stove project is and why it is so important, I can tell you about the adventures of building one of these bad boys!

Before I go any further, I need to thank all of “fundhis” (construction workers) in Africa who seriously prepared me for this experience. I never thought that I’d use those cement mixing skills again but as it turns out, mixing cement is remarkably similar all around the world!

It takes two days to build one stove so I built two stoves this week for two different families. So I arrived on day one, ready to build. I had my work gloves in hand and my camera at the ready. What I wasn’t prepared for was to be greeted in Santa Maria with a monsoon. So I’m not sure how much news this has made at home but there was recently a hurricane in Nicuragua (Hurricane Alma) and we have definitely been feeling the effects of it up here in Guatemala!
Within 3 minutes, I was soaked from head to toe...and this is before getting to the house! The mason I was working with for the week gave me a pink plastic tarp to wear as a skirt, I threw on my raincoat and it was off to my first house about a km away. I walked into the aluminum tin door of the community (gives new meaning to the term gated community...), pulled back the sheet that doubles as a door for this family and had a look around. That pretty much involved turning 360 degrees around in a circle and the home tour was over.

Some of you loyal blog fans may remember a little girl I told you about in my first entry about my students named Brenda...or more commonly known as Gordita (little fat girl). Well, that is the house I was building my first stove in! She sat in a tiny chair the entire time and watched me shovel, scoop, saw and moan every 45 seconds asking me in Spanish “What are you doing?”, I’d answer, and then “Why?”
Somehow in all my Spanish lessons, the terms cement, re-bar, mortar and wire cutter didn’t make the vocabulary lists so I pretty much just kept saying, “I’m building you a stove!” But in English, it went something like this:

Sift about 50 pounds of dirt to get all the rocks out. Add some cement. Stir. Add some water. Stir And Voila! You’ve got yourself some good lookin’ mortar! We took that mortar and made a foundation and started laying the cinder blocks to form the stove. Once that was up...the REAL fun was about to begin.

Now, I don’t usually swear in this blog because I’m just not sure who out there is reading it. But kids, watch out, because here it comes. So once the foundation is up and a few layers of bricks are laid, comes the re-bar...or as I lovingly call it...the Fucking Re-Bar. Re-bar (which I have no idea how to spell or what it means) is just a metal bar that we had to saw into about 15,000 pieces (ok fine, 12 pieces) and then make into a grid.

Lets just say that I have a lot of skills, but sawing Fucking Re-Bar just ain’t one of them. It probably took me about an hour to cut these 12 lousy pieces of Fucking Re-bar. And after that, I tied them together with wire (as it turns out, not so good at wire cutting either...) But the finished project was beautiful and I’ve never seen such a beautiful re-bar grid...

Anyway, after that, it is time to lay the bricks and then place the stove top (not quite as simple as it sounds...making that baby level was no easy task!) This is how the stove looks after day one:

So after day one, I dragged my soaking wet tush home for a shower and some dry clothes and put myself and my arms that felt like Jello to sleep for the night.

Ok...quick intermission from the stove project. So we arrived at the bus stop on Tuesday morning decked out in our rain gear and found out that there had been some mud slides and serious wind issues at Santa Maria so we couldn’t go up to the project...Rain Day!!

We spent the day bumming around Antigua, saw a movie and did everything we could to stay dry. But in the afternoon, we decided what better way to spend a rainy afternoon in Antigua than to try out our hips at a little salsa lessons?!?

Well, I could go on about this one for a while but let’s just say it was hilarious, SOOO fun and actually resulted in two more small group lessons since! Check out the video...

Luckily, by Wednesday, the storm had let up and it was back to Santa Maria for stove number 2. Because of the tight timing, they had to finish the first stove without me and I had to move straight onto Wilmer’s stove (another kid I blogged about earlier) Wilmer’s house was much different than Brenda’s. It wasn’t made of reed and at first I found myself saying, this is actually pretty nice! And then I took another look and realized that I think I’ve been away from home just a bit too long if this is now what I consider nice...

Anyway, because I missed day #2, guess what I got to start out my day with on Wednesday? Yep! You got it...Fucking Re-Bar! Anyway, this day was remarkably similar to my first so I won’t recount it.
But my last day was awesome and I actually got to finish my first stove! We sealed the entire stove with a very smooth cement and when it was finished, I honestly am not sure I’ve ever seen such a beautiful stove in my life.

It was so incredible to see the entire family looking on as the stove was built before their eyes. In this smoke-filled room stood a stove that will actually add up to 15 years onto each family member’s life. It is so incredible that this $200 stove which is nothing more than sand, cement, water, bricks and of course, re-bar, will add a total of up to 150 years onto the lives of one family. (yes...8 kids in Wilmer’s family)

When I had finished the stove, the mason handed me a nail and I got to etch my name and country into this stove. I can hardly believe that in these two homes, my name will be etched into a stove that will last more than 20 years.

Just as the stove was finishing, the mom in the house looked at the stove and asked me if I was able to have a stove like this in my house in the States. I didn’t even know how to answer. It is so incredible just how far away we seem to them and how something as small as a stove can bring us all together.
xoxo, Debra