Better late than never!

Two weeks in and I sit down for the first time to write about my trip to El Salvador - not exactly punctual you might say, but at least its keeping with the laid-back Central American attitude to life! What prompted me to finally get going was a combination of guilt at reading about friends' EWB placements that seemed really interesting and the fact that from next week Steph and I will be disappearing off into the bundu for a week of fieldwork, so if I don't start now I never will.....

I guess the best place to start would be the beginning - walking out of the airport into the sultry evening heat of El Salvador and the beaming smile of Domingo, waiting to collect me. The hour-long drive across the country to get to San Salvador was a bit of a shock, but that was soon forgotten once I was ensconced in a double bed at Hostal Ximena - asleep within seconds I swear!


Since then I've moved into a bunkbed dorm with bobbly mattresses, but windows on three sides out onto a roof patio where I feast on mangos, pawpaws and watermelon in the sun every morning - what a treat, and a far cry from the typical Salvadorean breakfast of refried beans (frijoles), plaintains, cheese, eggs and of course the ubiquitous tortillas!



One of the perks of staying in a hostal has to be the people you meet - many happy nights have been spent swapping stories with the endless carnival of travellers passing through - skydiving Rudi, the American with a freakishly similar life history to me (and the same name!), the unfortunate baseball fan who lost his debit card in a bus station and is now stranded here....the list goes on!

Reading this you'd quickly forget that I'm actually working while I'm out here - a testament to how enjoyable its been. The project details were still very hazy when I arrived, but since then all has become clear - Steph and I will be evaluating the two designs of improved wood burning stove that different departments in REDES have been building into houses, along with a third one - the 'Rocket' stove, designed by an American thermodynamicist which is being promoted by a local NGO (called CRC) in communities around Suchitoto.

My first week at work was spent reading up on wood-burning stove design principles, which are actually far more interesting than they sound (at least to someone with a vague grounding in thermo.) From these it was immediately clear that there are some major problems with the existing REDES designs - both are made from heavy adobe bricks, and are large structures, which gives them a high thermal mass and therefore lots of firewood is used to heat the body of the stove, rather than the food you're cooking...this might not be such a problem if the house required heating, but as it's currently 'winter' here with average daily temperatures around 25-30 degrees, heating is the last thing needed! There are also other issues with the maintenance of them - especially for one ingenious design with three 'hobs' which quickly gets clogged with ash and only serves to billow smoke into the kitchen.

As a result the uptake of these stoves has been very poor - something found out by last year's volunteers who evaluated all of the different areas that the REDES Infrastructure group are involved in (sanitation, housing, stoves, hydroponics and poultry farming.) Our challenge is to get to the root of the problem and recommend to REDES which of the three designs they should adopt for future projects - including more than 50 new houses planned for later this year. We've also got some interesting ideas about incorporating the new REDES solar cookers project into the investigation, as there's great potential for that - so far I've had two half-days when its been cloudy and sun the rest of the time, accompanied by dramatic afternoon thunderstorms and deluges - eat your heart out England!