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BOOM pop pop pop pop
BANG. This is what I woke up to this
morning around 5. Evidently, there is a
local festival going on this week. It involves
loud music, firecrackers and dancing through the night and morning. We have a wonderful breakfast at the hotel we
are staying and, and before you know it, we’re packed back into a bus and on
the road again. This time we are going
way out into what feels like the middle of nowhere. After a good hour and a half, we arrive at a
remote village. This village was quite
poor. It was astonishing to see what
kind of conditions they lived in. From
the looks of it, many places had dirt floors, and only had basic frames of a
house with some dried wood was the walls.
We were in the village to install new stoves into homes. Many, if not all of the homes in the village
had a fireplace in or near the house that when in use, would fill the house
with smoke. This was obviously a
problem, the leader of our project, Ruddy, informed us that doctors have come
here and have seen a large amount of eye and lung problems, linking back to the
amount of inhaled smoke from the fire every time some food is cooked. The
stoves we were to install were ones that required no tools to assemble or
move. They were basically cinderblocks
on the ground, on which a burning chamber rested. Heat and smoke would rise from the burning
chamber to warm a surface above it, and when the space was filled with smoke,
it would funnel out the back and into the chimney. The chimney would then move the smoke outside
of the home like a traditional wood stove would do. One of the homes we set this up on was
actually in the middle of cooking dinner when we arrived. I could immediately understand why Ruddy said
that these people suffered from lung and eye problems. The smoke was very thick and noxious inside
the house. We tore apart the old cooking
area and installed the new one. Before
we were even finished with putting the chimney in place, the woman of the house
was already trying to start a fire. We
had to get her to stop but she was quite anxious to use her new stove. When we were ready for her to start a fire,
we called for her and she comes in with a plate literally full of burning
sticks to dump into the chamber. After a
few adjustments to the chimney, it was going great, smoke outside the house,
not inside. The entire family seemed
extremely happy about our work.
All of the people in this
village that I saw seemed to be happy with their lives. Even though we may call their lives simple,
they were content. It makes me wonder,
do we really need all of the things we have in our lives? Of course not. We can live without TV, the internet, and
most modern technology, including indoor plumbing. But yet, even as I think this to myself, I
cannot really imagine myself living in such a way, at least not for my entire
life. It really does server a good
reminder that one can be happy even with very little.
I did notice another
thing. In the last house that we
visited, they did not have proper walls, a bathroom or even a non-dirt
floor. There was electricity, but it was
very limited and obviously, sparsely used.
They did not have a refrigerator
or anything like that, but they, at least the children, all had cell
phones. Dr. Skon had talked about this
before; some cultures skip certain technology phases. To us it seems absurd to have cell phones but
no indoor plumbing or even decent electric lighting. But yet these people see it differently. As to what exactly they see, I am not sure I
understand, but they clearly have a different view on things that I do, which
isn’t too hard to believe. I am very
hopeful and nearly certain that the few hours of work that we did today has the
possibility of greatly increasing the quality of life for a a few families. Inhaling a little less smoke can go a long
ways.
Tonight after dinner, Dr.
Skon gathered a few of us who would be repairing lights in the morning to show
us how to do what we need to and for practice.
But more on that tomorrow. I am
hoping that tonight I will be able to sleep through the night without the sound
of fireworks waking me, but I am not overly confident in that happening.
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