Today was incredible! This morning we went out for our first day of working in houses and helping the people here. Today we learned how to put together the safe stoves that are being given to the people. These stoves are designed to be much much safer for the families using them. For starters these stoves have a chimney to take the smoke out. This may sound like common sense but in most of the houses the cooking is done under some sort of covered place. A great deal of smoke is then in hailed causing many breathing problems and also eye problems from the smoke.The next reason these stoves are so important is that the way they are made the out side is safe to touch while using. Often time children get burned from stoves that families have made from whatever they have around. A third benefit to the stoves are that they are more efficient and because so burn less wood but still cooks the same. This means that they can cook more with out having to go out and find/cut more as often. Here is a before and after picture of one of the houses we worked at today.
Clearly the one on the left looks much more safer and suitable for cooking. It is a much needed improvement for these families. Tomorrow we will be breaking out in to groups some will be working on more stoves. Others will be working on setting up hand washing stations and I will be helping modify solar powered lights. They already have solar powered LED lights that they have used however we found that the rechargeable batteries it originally comes with are not that good and do not ladt that long. We have a solution to the problem. We will be taking the battery cells from old laptop batteries and will swap those in for the old ones. Even though the laptop batteries are old they are still much stronger and due to a different chemical make up and hold a charge much longer than the other batteries. It should be a very fun and productive day. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.
Peace,
Josh Aleshire
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