Stoves for the Women

A while back you may remember a blog posting about the stoves that were being built for the women in Chiapas.  These simple stoves allow the smoke to be vented out of the houses which provides a much safer enviroment inside the house.  Here are the earlier pictures.

This will give you an idea of a typical cooking arrangement which may appear  idealic if not efficient or safe.

Please note the smoke in the home of Don Jose where his wife is cooking and you can easily see the difference that a stove with little smoke will make in the life of that family

With simple materials and some instruction an efficient and inexpensive stove can be built in a short time. 

A finished stove.  After a few days of drying this one will be ready to serve its family for many years.

Richared wrote "we have a stove building workshop planned for this coming weekend. Three days to build three stoves of clay. The idea is that we will build three stoves with the instructor building one while everyone watches. The second day the students will join in the building and the final day the students will build one by themselves. Afterwards, the hope is that the stoves will spread and the young folks in the classes can make a little money building stoves for others in the village. Stoves are a little thing that is very important. Sixty five percent of the lung cancer in this region of the world is affecting women. All those cases are related to the carcinogens of wood smoke from open cooking fires. The stoves we are building use a stove pipe of metal to exhaust the smoke- also using only one third of the firewood of open fires."

Notice the design change in the stoves.  As Allen says these only take $60 in materials.  If you send your contribution to us we will get it to the stove project.