Building Appropriate Technologies...

Last week the Long Way Home crew completed two appropriate technology projects; a solar shower for ourselves and a wood-burning stove for our neighbors. With the help of our resident AT Peace Core member, Ben, we were able to construct our shower over a two and a half week period, while the stove took us just five days to finish.
The solar shower is a very simple peice of equipment requiring some lengths of hard PVC piping, 50 to 100 meters of black tubing, a couple of valves, a shower head, roof space and a few hours of direct sunlight per day. We fit all the peices together by putting the black tubing (mangera) under a flame, leaving it malleable and then fitting it over its PVC counterpart. We used a strong adhesive (pegamiento) and wire to stick and securely fasten all joints together. The 100 meter coil of mangera is located on top of our shower and bath rooms, on a flat surface, which recieves at least six hours of direct sunlight a day. We may place a piece of sheet metal underneath the mangera in the future in order to amplify the heat the coil recieves from the sun and thus heat the water in the tube faster and with less sunlight. Considering that our water supply flows at least 200-300 feet down hill from its source before reaching the mangera coil, we now have a very strong, hot flow from the shower, which is quite a luxury.
While the solar shower has certainly added to the gringos comfortability at Parque Chimiya, this is not what we came here for. That is why building the stove for our neighbor David and his family was so much more rewarding, and became the central project for us last week.
The stove was built in 6 stages, more or less. First you dig out a small, rectangular fitting which becomes the base for the whole cooking station. After digging and leveling, we mixed-up a batch of cement and began placing the cinder-block foundation. Three levels of cinder-blocks later we packed the center of the cinder-block rectangle with garbage, rock and dirt until it was filled to the top, forming a single, solid platform. Upon this platform we then layed clay tiles, on top of which the wood is burned. After that structure sat for a day and settled and hardened, we came back and built the enclosed stove area itself. Using a mixture of fine sand, clay and molassas we coated the tiled floor of the stove and built-up a three-sided brick casing for the metal stove-top (plancha o pollo). The molassas mixture is used around the stove area instead of cement because it bakes and hardens like brick after just a few firings. Finally, we placed the plancha in its brick casing and attached and sealed the stove-pipe and ran it up through the roof.
It is interesting to note that this final step of placing a proper smoke exhaust system is really the most important aspect of building stoves like these in the developing world. For most Guatemalan women their day is filled with two activities; washing clothes by hand and cooking over an open fire. Many women experience complications in pregnancy and birth defects in their children because of the years of smoke inhalation. In addition, firewood (leña) is a big expense or a very time consuming effort for most Guatemalan families, as they almost always have a fire going in order to cook or make tortillas (tortillar). The efficient stove we built for David and his family will hopefully allow his mother, the perpetual cook, to breath in less smoke, while saving them time and money.