Cocinas Mejoradas II

We finished our cocinas mejoradas project, twelve cookstoves for twelve families, 61 beneficiaries in all. My community counterpart Aldo Rodríguez and I funded this project with money left over from our renovation of a kindergarten six months ago.

Because our funds were limited ($750.00) we chose low-income families, families headed by single mothers or families that include women or children with respiratory or vision problems exacerbated by cooking over open fires. As you can see from the photos, the cocinas mejoradas contain the heat source and also divert smoke away from the kitchen area and expel that smoke and other contaminants via a metal chimeney similar to that of a woodstove used for home heating in the U.S.

The 12 families have been uniformly grateful for the stoves and satisfied with their operation. We installed the first stoves in July and have returned to visit the families and to monitor the use of the stoves and seek comments from the señoras.

We installed stoves in various sectors of Callanca so that neighbors of the families who benefited from the project would see the stoves in operation; we’ve received many requests for stoves, which could indicate that the families with stoves are very pleased with them or could also mean that pretty much anybody will react with enthusiasm when you’re giving something away. All we asked from the families was a contribution of 60 adobes (at a value of a grand total of 6 soles, two bucks) and some mud from which to make mortar.

We’re calling this a pilot project in hopes that we can use the positive results to generate funding for a more extensive—and expensive—project. We would like to construct 50 more stoves, which would cost some 10,000 soles ($3,700.00) or in other words about one quarter of one second of air time from an Obama or Romney campaign ad.