Summer Newsletter -- We have been busy

Water for Humans Summer Newsletter: 2014

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WFH exists because of you!!! Thank you for your support. 

click on a picture for the story behind it

   

   

   

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BEAUTIFUL DISHES

What's so special about these dishes in Oaxaca? They are clean! And they are in the same room as a La Mazateca stove. This would never have happened in homes with traditional three-stone fires burning openly. Since late last year, 90 families have installed these stoves in the 4 communities where Water for Humans works. So far 640 men, women, and children have experienced greatly reduced indoor smoke, and women and girls are reporting that their wood cutting time has been reduced 50 to 70%. After seeing the working stoves, another 100 families would like to install them. It is very important to note that these stoves are not given to households. Rather, the community and families have to work to get funding. 

This success has caused us to pursue a second generation clean cook-stove - Generation 2.0. This new stove design will be less costly and much easier to build, more efficient, and thus more sustainable. To make this a reality, we are raising funds for research and development, prototype tooling, and stove certification by the Aprovecho Research Center in Cottage Grove, OR. Certification is very important, because it will give the stove world-wide credibility and enable the stove-builders and emerging social venture enterprise to support their claims as they market the stove. 

Certification of clean cook-stoves is an initiative from the UN and the World Bank. Generaton 2.0 will meet the certification standards of the Global Alliance for Clean Cook-stoves. This includes international standards certified by a third party for indoor and outdoor emissions, and overall cooking efficiencies. The certification process enhances WFH's design process for producing a better stove. It also allows governments, NGOs and end users to objectively evaluate different technologies and provides the potential of selling carbon credits to support climate change initiatives. The Gen-2 clean cook-stoves will be tested in the homes of participating community members. 

Our goal: Generation 2.0 cook-stove will be ready six to nine months after we secure the required funding. 
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CHIAPAS DELEGATION

Where are these people in traditional Chiapas clothing headed? Through our partners at The Hunger Project, women in Chiapas heard about the Generation 1 "La Mazateca" clean cook-stoves and created a video explaining why they needed La Mazateca. They invited Water for Humans and the Mazateca stove-builders to Chiapas. But first, a group from Chiapas traveled to the Mazateca to meet families using the stoves. This was an extraordinary and unique event: Two very different indigenous communities seeking each other out and coming together for mutual advancement. The two indigenous groups needed translators, because few of them speak Spanish, yet they made an amazing connection. In both Chiapas and the Mazateca, the clean cook-stove program has the potential to reach 50,000 people. 
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THE ROAD INTO BAYALEMO, Larrainzar Municipality, Chiapas

Where is this road gong? In late June 2014, this was the first view of Bayalemo for Mazatec stove-builders who made the journey along with Water for Humans co-founder, Stan Brown. The group from the Mazateca spent the next week building a pilot stove with the local community. 
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THE STOVE DESIGN PROCESS

Why are these pots significant? Women in Bayalemo discussed what size pots they would most want to use on the new stove, and after lots of pots were tried out, came to a decision that enabled the stove-builders to modify the stove top design to accommodate the preferred pot sizes. Water for Humans makes sure that local conditions, culture, preferences, and practical concerns are all taken into consideration in our design, engineering, and building processes. This way, long after we are gone our technologies will continue to serve the community.
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BIG PILES OF WOOD

This photo gives some of us a backache just looking at it! This is the amount of wood people in Bayalemo, Chiapas need to keep close at hand for just a few weeks of cooking. Multiply this amount of wood by the 50,000 people in the region who are expected to adopt the La Mazateca clean cook-stove. That's a lot of wood coming out of the rainforest, and that means lost habitat for rainforest creatures and plants, less groundwater retention, less shade for coffee, less water during the annual four-month drought, and more flooding when it finally does rain. The reduction in wood cutting that comes with the adoption of clean cook-stoves will make a major difference for the rainforest and the people living here. 
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HAPPY WOMEN COOKING

These women are happy with the Bayalemo pilot stove and thrilled to start using it as part of the Bayalemo stove lighting ceremony. They also are looking forward to seeing more of these clean cook-stoves in their community. Now and in the coming months when more stove-builders are being trained is the perfect time to introduce the much improved Generation-2 stove. Water for Humans is actively raising funds to complete engineering and testing for this improved stove that will be even less expensive and can be built anywhere in the world. 
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WOMAN WITH LA MAZATECA

This photo was taken in Bayalemo on the day of the new pilot stove lighting ceremony. Compare the thumb-sized diameter of this fuel wood with the photo of big wood piles. Wood this size can be found closer to home, it's easier to transport, and far less is needed. 
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HANDS WEAVING

All along, the Water for Humans team has predicted that as women and girls are freed from the massive amount of time they spend cutting and carrying firewood, they will find more productive uses for their time. The women in Bayalemo already know what they want to do: create more of the beautiful crafts such as the weaving shown here to sell from their cooperative.
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RICK IN A SUIT

Who is the man in the suit? It's Rick McKenney, Water for Humans co-founder and executive director in Geneva accepting an award from the International Licensing Executive Society that is very valuable for us and the communities we work with in Mexico. The award is for pro-bono work securing patents and licensing for our clean cook-stoves. 

With the help of our partner, The Hunger Project (THP), and patent attorneys associated with Invent for Humanity, we plan to secure intellectual property rights in Latin America and India. In collaboration with THP, we will help form a co-op business structure for a social enterprise starting with our current promoters (stove builders) to make the stoves available in the greater Mazateca region. 
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"La Mazateca" Video of our stove builders and users

Please check this out.  It is in Spanish, we are working on translating it and we will post an English version soon.

At SeaTac to Mexico

Stan & I are going back to Oaxaca to finish up our work to train and build the remaining 88 stoves.

Wish us good luck and success.

On the bus to Haualta

We got the 8:45 bus to Haualta from the south bus station "TAPO". Axel's mom gave us a ride to the station. We drove around a few times as the main entrance was closed. The bummer of the day is we got seats with less leg room. Our knees will be bruised. The ride is a good 6+  hours. The bus stops now and then to pick a up food vendors.  For me bus & plane rides are a chance to do some fun reading. On this ride I am reading "Red' by Terry Tempest Williams. My head is deep in red rock country :)

After we leave Haualta, we will be off line as in Tenango there is only one Internet cafe, with limited hours. We have a satellite phone but it is$1.50 a minute to make a call.

Thus, wish us good luck with our stove building, and we hope to post an update when we have a good connection.

One more night in Mexico City

We finally got the go ahead to go back to San Jose Tenango, but like most things in Mexico we will travel a day later than we thought.  We will take the bus from Mexico City to Haualata a 6+ hour trip. where Roberto will pick us up and take us to San Jose Tenango.

Our plan is to finish the one stove we started before the elections.  If all goes well we will start work - workshop on Thursday morning and we should complete the stove - workshop and light a fire in it, on Sunday afternoon.  But you never know how things will go until it is complete.

We are happy to get back to what we came to do, however the full scale (building the 88 stoves) program will not resume late September.

We will be offline (satellite phone only) until we leave San Jose Tenango and get to Haualta (cell coverage starts- ends there), on our way back to Mexico City (hopefully on Monday morning).

Wish us luck and successful building - cooking.

Metal parts for 89 cookstoves

Evevthough we are going back to San Jose Tenango to finish the first stove we started. We now have all the metal parts for 89 stoves.

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.