Rocket stoves and roosting chickens – rural Suchitoto.

Since Steph’s arrival we’ve been working on the questionnaire that we plan to use for evaluating the various wood-burning stoves used by REDES and the Rocket stove introduced to El Salvador by their partners, CRC. Last Thursday we took a day trip up to the Suchitoto area to do a trial run of five families with Rocket stoves to help us weed out the questions that aren’t understood or don’t seem relevant. Needless to say the leaders of the community were wonderful, dropping whatever they were doing at home to walk around the village introducing us to families and then plying us with tamales, home-made cream and endless tales from the war – forcing Franco to drag us away to get back to San Salvador.

The first week of August here is a national holiday related to various patron saints, but unfortunately my grand plans for travelling around the country were dashed by Tito who pointed out that as we’re only here for ten weeks, the last thing we’d want to do is take a week off. Obviously! So instead last week saw us heading into a rural community to start gathering data - with Tito’s warning still ringing in our ears that anything that can go wrong will, we set off on Monday morning.

Over the course of the week Tito was proven right time and time again – just about everyone we met had been expecting us the day before, and our host in El Sitio Zapotal thought we were staying for one night to visit 3 families, not the 30 we eventually managed! Bearing that in mind it was amazing how much we managed to get done – mostly due to the wonderful hospitality and flexibility of everyone we met, who were willing to drop everything to help us out, or failing that volunteer their children to take us around the village instead!

It was refreshing to see that people actually use the Rocket stove, especially when compared to Colima where its clear that nobody uses the REDES stove in their kitchen. In fact we only met one woman who was blatantly lieing about using her Rocket stove – we’d just watched her extricate it from the bottom of a large pile of boxes and clothes! The spring balance we produce at the end of each interview to weigh their estimated wood usage got a few funny looks too, but remarkably nearly every woman said that the Rocket stove reduced their wood consumption by about 60% as well as producing less smoke. We also discovered that there are some durability issues as at least half of the stoves have broken bits, only a year after the project started, and a number of women asked for a larger version for boiling maize and frijoles, especially those with large families.

It was also a nice change from San Salvador and its fast food joints on every corner – the path up to the house became a raging torrent of water when it rained and there were chickens everywhere underfoot, along with yelping dogs and a horse that lives in the garden.

Although I could have done without being woken every morning at 4am by a dozen cockerels, or the hen which was desperately trying to roost in our window!