One of the best parts of our school, Pop Wuj, is that they have a lot of community service projects in the communities surrounding Xela which are not very far away, but people have much less than in Xela. Melanie and I will be doing mobile clinics in these communities as well as helping with the after school program and the nutrition program while we are here. Our first week we started with one of the longest running projects called the Stove Project.
The stove project was developed in order to combat the serious issues facing households who rely on an indoor open fire for their cooking needs;these problems include deforestation due to increased consumption of firewood, the severe respiratory problems attributable to heavy smoke and poor ventilation in one-room homes, and frequent burn accidents which occur when young children play around the open flame. An amazing statistic I learned is that illnesses contracted from smoke inhalation are the second leading cause of death among children in Guatemala, as well as being a serious problem for adults. The stove project aims to relieve these problems, as well as foster community development, through the construction of simple yet more efficient, safer stoves for the families of Pacaxjoj.
All of the projects at Pop Wuj are funded by donations. They have a nonprofit foundation in the US that you can donate to called Todos Juntos. I can tell you that from what I have seen the money is not wasted here, so if you have some extra bucks here is the foundation's website:
http://www.todos-juntos.org/index.html
This picture gives a little context for the community though I forgot to take a picture of the actual house. It was a very poor community and many families had little more than shacks. It was mostly farmland with scattered houses (and animals).
This is the beautiful background scenery we had that day (it was luckily not raining and only partly cloudy). It was absolutely beautiful.
This is what the stove looked like when we started. It takes 3 weeks to build a stove and we were lucky that our first week in Xela was the 3rd week for this stove so we got to see the finished product.
This is Melanie cutting a brick with a machete. Sometimes it seems like machetes are the only tool you need here. I am seriously considering getting one because you never know when you need to reshape a brick, dig a hole for a tree, or cut your hair.
This is my teacher hammering in a brick with very dramatic lighting.
After we line the main part of the stove with bricks we use clay to keep them in place. A metal cooking surface is added to the top of the stove and a metal chimney is put in the groove at the back. Then everything is sealed with concrete. It really is an amazing process. It uses very simple materials (except for the metal) and can be done by lay people (though there was this amazing woman, Dona Leti, who oversaw the project and did everything while carrying her two year old child on her back).
This a picture of what their old stove looked like. It was a big metal bin with a grate on top. It was outside because the weather was nice and we were working on the new stove, but when it rains (which is often) it has to be pulled inside and becomes much more of a health and safety hazard.
This is the little girl who lived at the house where we built the stove. She is standing in her backyard which is a field of corn and other crops I could not readily identify.
This is Melanie and her housemate at her home stay, Priya, mixing cement for the finishing touches of the stove.
This is the group of students (minus me) with the finished stove. From left: Melanie, Lucia, Joe, and Priya. You can see the chimney on the left side and the cement top finish on top of the bricks.
The woman on the right is Dona Leti with her sleeping child on her back and the woman on the right is the owner of the house where we built the stove and that is her son peaking into the camera. She is pouring us shots of aquadiente (a locally made liquor) to celebrate the completion of the stove. :)
All in all it was a great day and we were absolutely disgustingly dirty and tired when we were finished. It was an amazing experience to be a part of changing the lives of these people in a concrete (no pun intended) way. Hopefully we will have many more days like that while we are here.
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