CCotowincho, Agosto 26-- The tall, boxy stetson the Quechua woman wore couldn´t hide the fact that this grandmother was not even five feet tall. The lines on her mocha-colored face disclosed her years. She stepped out of the clinic into the bright noon-day sun and her small eyes glanced in my direction. I was close enough to the doorway that she extended her hand. I wasn´t one of the clinicians who had waited on her, but she extended her hand nonetheless. She was grateful.
Inside the clinic there was an oblong rectangular poster, a 360-degree view of the Urubamba valley as seen from CCotowincho, which is called ¨Afghanistan¨by the locals for its rugged, stark landscape. To one side you can still see the scar where a landslide deposited a pile of rubble along this border of Urubamba. The poster, which showed the soaring mountains that ring this valley included a slogan: "Una comunidad de viviendas productivas." (A community of productive housing.) The aspiration is noteworthy. Many of the homes in CCotowincho are as humble as the sod houses of pioneers of the American prairie. A ditch beside one home where we installed a stove served as the latrine. Much of the earth is chalk-like. These people are the poorest of the poor. And yet the slogan on that poster may be spot-on."Everyone who lives here is coming from a worse place," observes Joe Lerman, an aspiring doctor and one of the local staff at the ProPeru office in Urubamba. This is a community whose homes and lives are literally rising from rubble. The dirt these people walk on has become the stuff of new lives and buildings that stand as evidence of a stubbornly indomitable spirit.
If the slogan is not yet the reality, it represents the aspiration of these people who live in the service area of Urubamba and have their own ¨president.¨ (In Peru, outlying areas have presidents; cities have mayors.)
We had visited CCotowincho earlier in the week as a preparatory visit for installing stoves. The president had met us and asked whether we might set up a clinic for a handful of residents who needed attention. ProPeru had expected our clinic to run for a couple hours while part of our contingent installed stoves. But when the clinic opened, the handful grew and the clinic ran into the afternoon. One man had experienced problems urinating for two years (due to an enlarged prostate), so he drank less fluids, dehydrating himself. A woman laid her son on a gurney and told the clinicians he wasn´t well. Patty, a doctor from South King County, collected a urine sample, smelled it, and realized the child was dehydrated. Apparently the mother had been taking herbs that slowed her lactation--or perhaps the effect was passed to the son through her breast milk. A mother with three teeth missing sat on a bench and nursed her baby, who kept her eyes locked cautiously on me while I played peek with her. She reached up to touch her mother´s cheek, and the mother recoiled; did she have another tooth problem? People came in with back and knee pains, probably caused from years of packing heavy loads. There was a case of bronchitis and another of epilepsy with possible brain damage from falling. Another individual had gall stones.
While this was going on, I and Avaleena Bhati worked on a stove that for the time being was outside a house. The family´s plan was to expand the house, eventually enclosing the stove. Avaleena was born in Pakistan and came to the United States as an infant. She lives in Seattle and hopes to go to the University of Washington to study to become a physician´s assistant. her boyfriend is studying to be a physician, and they plan to marry in December. Supervising and guiding us was Christina, a volunteer, who returns to the states on Monday. We slathered on the sun block and got to work, eventually running out of barro--mud--that serves as the glue for the stove parts. A neighbor came to the rescue by mixing up some more, and Jaime Olave, director of the stove project, shown below, put on the finishing touches with a trowel.
This is how the finished stove looked. The chimney will be extended when the new room is added around it.
Installing cleaner-burning cookstoves isn't just a matter of showing up with some ceramic tiles and a wheelbarrow of mud. It is a socio-political endeavor at which Jaime excels. The first day we visited CCotowincho involved Jaime checking in on a housewife to see how she was using the stove and whether it was working for her, then knocking on some doors to see whether residents were using their stoves successfully. The photo below shows what one of them looked like. Note that instead of sitting on a burner the pots sit in a well, where they trap more of the heat, which means water boils faster. The pots sit on iron re-bar, which is easily replaced. Jaime has made several modifications to the original stove design making it easier for the homeoner to maintain and repair. The concept is that, if ProPeru ceased to exist today, the stoves could still be maintained affordably.
The picture below, taken August 29, shows a "four-burner" stove Jaime Olave built for a local "restaurant." There is a bedroom door right beside the kitchen. Until this stove was installed, with its chimney, smoke was continually filling this kitchen and escaping into the bedroom. for several hours each day. Note: Smoke in a room reflects the light from a camera flash. There is NO smoke reflection in this kitchen.
The next day, August 30, we were back in town, installing a stove in this room, which served as the kitchen and bedroom for a home complex. The object in front of the door is the metal mold around which we situated the bricks and ceramic plates used to construct the stove.
Love,
Robert
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