Keep On Cranking Out The Cocinas!

After working on the clean-burning stove project for the past three years, we've become fairly accomplished builders and can regularly install two to three new stoves each day.

But despite this undeniable efficiency, we oftentimes hit minor roadblocks — some self-imposed and some beyond our control. One thing's for sure, though — in our quest to always improve our process and model, we've learned to embrace obstacles and view them as positive opportunities rather than negative setbacks.

One problem this year came from our desire to construct chimneys for the stoves more quickly (with the same, if not better quality, of course). During the overall construction process — from the early stages of gathering materials to the final fixing of the finished product to the roof of the house — we have a mantra that we are "always innovating." The phrase has a comical backstory with roots connected to our good friend Vicente, a member of the Huanuscuro community we trust and respect perhaps more than any other of his fellow neighbors. A primary reason for our close ties to Vicente is that he's always getting his hands dirty, helping us install stoves in the houses and oftentimes comes up with clever ways to make an installation better. And so the phrase that Vicente is "always innovating," was conceived.

Soon we were using the phrase in our own building process and when we saw an opportunity to expedite the aluminum-flattening process (for chimneys), we decided to embrace a change. So instead of stomping on the metal with our feet, we used our hands to basically bend it back. Instead of providing a flatter product, we got a more crinkled one instead, with dangers of holes opening up as a viable possibility. But after realizing our mistake, we simply retreated back to our old method — not a bad one by any stretch, just a little noisy and time-consuming.

                   

                

Another problem came from mother nature. One of our first days in Huanuscuro this year, we were approached by a woman we built a stove for the previous year, telling us her chimney needed to be repaired. We were initially a bit skeptical because the other chimneys speckled around town looked almost perfectly in tact. After seeing her chimney for ourselves, however, it was confirmed that precipitation had severely oxidized the metal.

Luckily, the interior stove was still functional, so we simply installed a new chimney. We were approached by a few other community members with a similar issue, but by no means was it a unanimous problem. However, it is an issue we're looking into, as self-standing sustainability and longevity is always our ultimate goal.

For all our pitfalls, however, our successes overwhelmingly prevail as the most notable aspect of our work. Taking a step back to view our achievements and progress over the past three summers, we've constructed an unbelievable amount of stoves and next summer we will undoubtedly surpass the 100-stoves-built benchmark — an incredible achievement when considering how many families that affects and furthermore just how many individual lives are improved because of this simple change in the way they cook meals.

[Written by David Riva | Photos by Clare Toeniskoetter and Michelle Martin]