Lunch by Sylvia

Sylvia cooked a GREAT lunch for the entire staff. It is a traditional Yucatan meal from pork

Complete with the BEST Flan :) 

Do you know where your cloths come from?

Check this article out from the NY Times and the purple river!
Purple river

Love and Hate Sketch-Up

Like it or not I have been using SketchUP for a few months trying to make reasonably good drawings of our latest stove.  SketchUp is a great "free" CAD drawing program. However, it is very much "a figure it out as you go" kind of process (IE 2 steps forward and 1 step backwards). I have had my moments of frustration trying to draw something I can visualize but can't figure out how to draw it in SketchUp. I did not start this process wanting to become a SketchUp "sort of expert" but this is what I have become, like it or not.  Below are a few examples of our new stove.

The second challenge is the design has changed significantly since we arrived in Mexico to accommodate some different internal materials.  And the difficulty - frustration is exacerbated by the fact that I am using my mini computer (10" screen and no mouse)!

I know a ProE  "Jockey" could make these drawings in no time, but I am no expert in this and I really don't want to be one.

This design is a small step improvement from our original design which is easier to build, but not the final  design which will be much easier to build and significantly cheaper.

A day off in D.F.

WOW. it is Sunday and we have a day off!  It seems like whenever we are in Mexico we work 7 days a week so to have most of a Sunday off is GREAT.  We got up and had to search for breakfast as our usual weekend place doesn't open until 10 am.  We found a good place not too far from our hotel:  "Hotel Casa Blanca".  We then had a few hours of work to do.  We then went on a subway- walking adventure to the Frida Kahlo museum.  The subway in D.F. is great and it only costs 3 pesos!.  After 2 rides  we came to street level.  Then the guess was which way to walk, as the sun was directly overhead (hard to tell what was north).  We got our bearings and after a 20 minute walk we arrived, to stand in line for 45 minutes.


We spent a good 2+ hours there.  It was great but, most of her famous art was not on display there.  It was great to walk through her life and house.

This is part of her studio with her painting holder so she could paint in her wheelchair and lying on her back in bed!










Then, upon getting to the subway station (a new line) we had to buy smart cards to get our fair! $10 pesos.  Now I feel like I need to ride the subway a lot to amortize the cost. :)  Anyway we got our smart cards and were back at our stop (General Hospital) in no time.  It was well after 4pm and way past lunch time so we then ate a GREAT meal at this roadside cafe.

Jacob takes off tomorrow (Monday back to DC as there is no point for him to stay as his scheduled return was on 20 July and if we go go back to Tenango to finish the stove he would have only had 1-2 days there.

Local elections have interrupted our workshop....

We went to San Jose Tenango on July 3rd and are back in Mexico City now because of political unrest in that area. We started the cook stove workshop on July 4th, working with the masons to build the foundation for the stove. July 5th turned out to be a long day because the masons built the stove walls. It was after dark before they finished, but the walls hardened overnight and everything was set and ready to go the next morning. July 6th we arrived ready to build the fire boxes. We got as far as cutting the cardboard forms, setting them in the brick enclosure, backfilling them to their proper heights and putting a layer of cement on top of the backfill. The next steps were to set the fireboxes (firebricks, insulated firebricks and a wooden firebox chimney form) & pot stands in place and filling the cardboard firebox forms with perlite for insulation. The plan was to do those next steps on Tuesday, July 9th, after taking a couple of days off for local elections. The afternoon of the 6th, The Hunger Project worked with the promoters (the workshop attendees) to coordinate their activities after the workshop. At that time, they passed out the list of families from each of the four communities who are on the cook stove list.

But, “the best laid schemes of mice and men go often awry.” Elections were held on Sunday, July 7th. The results came in and the final count had the top two vote getters within 400 votes of one another, out of 7,500 cast. Monday night the losing party decided to show their dissatisfaction with dynamite and gun play, which made the national news here. The Hunger Project decided to pull out of the area completely and to wait until the vote is certified and the local community has calmed down before resuming the cook stove project. We are now in Mexico City and will meet at The Hunger Project Headquarters tomorrow to determine our next steps.

Stove craziness :)

Today we are still working on the final bill of materials and trying to get everything ordered.  Last night we were up until well past midnight recalculating the number of bricks we need because we were told that are a different size!

Yesterday afternoon we bought a lot of the tools we will need to build the stoves, as the community members don't have any tools.

We now have the bill of materials finalized and it is a busy time calling suppliers. As I would expect it is a non trivial matter to get all the supplies for 89 stoves to a remote community. Sometimes the shipping is more then the cost of goods.

I have had a gut issue for the past few days, but Grapefruit seed extract fixed it !  I am happy for natural cures to bad gut bugs.

It took me 4 tries to get a new cell phone SIM card (cell phone service is a monopoly, owned by the richest guy in the world).  The first time we went to TelCel they said they didn't have any SIM cards and come back in a hour of so,  We went back but no SIM's, We almost went through the same thing today. Trip 1 on card, trip 2, they have the card and it took 5 minutes to get it and get the phone working!!  Customer service doesn't matter!

After a long day we are in D. F.

Finally made it to Mexico City! It took 3 hours to get through passport control, and Customs! Our flight landed at about 2:40, and I was 4 pm by the time we got to our hotel!

We then took a good walk to grab some Dinner. I know I will sleep hard tonight, after getting up at 2:30 am for the 5am flight from Seattle.