Kellie Burrows, Rob Howard, John Duntley, Kerry Reis, and Bill Fehrenbach from the Hudson Daybreak Rotary club told us about their trip as part of the Guatemala Stove Project. Those five and three others from their club traveled to the village of the San Raymundo, Guatemala to build stoves. They shared, through stories and pictures, the history and their impressions of the beautiful country and people of Guatemala. Trips to San Raymundo began in 2016 when Dr. Greg Young and Linda Robertson met local Rotarian Carlos Galvez. Seven thousand Chapina Bonita stoves have been constructed since then by numerous groups of volunteers.
The stoves they built will save lives. The traditional cooking method in rural villages is for women to cook over open fires indoors. An example photo in the presentation showed an iron pot on top of a wooden table with kindling and wood stuck under the pot. Open fire cooking indoors creates a lot of smoke, which gets into the women’s lungs and can cause lung cancer. Since women carry their babies in a sling as they work, babies breathe the smoke, too. One woman went to a doctor because she had lost her hearing. The doctor scraped the soot out of her ears and miraculously, she could hear again!
During this trip the Rotarians organized materials for 24 “stove kits”. Building a stove requires 55 bricks, 8 cinder blocks, and mortar mix for a total per stove of about $20. The family that receives a stove must pay half of the cost. The Chapina Bonita stove uses one-sixth the amount of wood required for the open-fire method of cooking. Wood is an increasingly scarce commodity, and it is expensive, with families spending up to 40% of their income on wood. The stoves allow the family to save money so that these stoves pay for themselves. It takes two days to construct a stove, and the Rotarians constructed 11 stoves while they were there.
So that seems like a lot of work and expense to travel to Guatemala to build stoves. The speakers addressed the question "Why not just send them $20 for the stove materials?" Their answer is in the connections made, the bonding with the community, the trust built between people and communities and countries. All of that is priceless. The travelers had a good time and they improved and even saved lives.