Shock absorbers in San Sebastian

Our last two weeks of fieldwork here in El Salvador have been spent visiting communities that received the two REDES designs of improved stove. Last Tuesday we set off for San Sebastian with Franco for a day trip to visit some of the more remote houses - unfortunately the family that hosted last year's volunteers was busy with the maize harvest and planting beans and REDES hadn't been able to find anywhere else for us to stay. All the same when we arrived and were introduced to one of the ladies from the community who would be helping to show us around, her neighbour immediately volunteered to take us in for free for the next two nights - another example of the amazing welcome and hospitality we've received from the wonderful Salvadoreans wherever we've been.

That afternoon we managed to do five interviews with Franco's help, and also got to see some of the beautiful, peaceful countryside in San Sebastian municipality, including the first house I've visited that was so remote that it didn't have access to electricity, and this is after five weeks of fieldwork in rural areas! The ride to some of the villages was a little rough, but I still a bit surprised when Franco found that the front left shock absorber wasn't really attached to the wheel in any way - written off with a shrug and a laugh, just another one of the problems that afflict REDES' cars!

It was a pleasant surprise to see that the majority of the families clearly use their stoves regularly as after our abortive trip to Colima to test our questionnaire (where only two people had ever tried their stoves and none use them) I have to admit we were more than a little sceptical about the REDES stoves. San Sebastian has the "plancha" design of stove from the PRODE (Program for Economic Development) section of REDES - it consists of V-shaped brick and adobe walls supporting a set of bars for cooking pots at the front and a long plate (the plancha) for making tortillas, leading into a chimney at the tip of the V.

The key difference between the Colima and San Sebastian projects strangely turns out to be the donor - the Spanish NGO who funded the Colima houses insisted that the stoves were built inside the house in a western-style kitchen. As a result they are unoccupied as the residents don't want to ruin their new houses with smoke-stained walls (the vast majority have not even tested their stoves, they assume that they will stain the walls and it has now become general knowledge that this happens.) In contrast the stoves in San Sebastian were built as a stand-alone project and therefore the families were able to choose where to build them - not one of them wanted a stove inside the house! This was a sad reminder of how well-meaning aid projects can end up shooting themselves in the foot by trying to impose their own view on what's modern and desirable on a totally different culture, without understanding the social aspects of the situation.

Our second day in San Sebastian was a day of two halves - in the morning we were helped by Teresa and "Chela" - two wonderful ladies from the community who showed us around all the houses with stoves by lunchtime, which was by far and away the most efficient we'd been during fieldwork, but it also left us with nothing to do in the afternoon. We rang REDES and suggested that if they could find us a contact from the community in nearby San Lorenzo or San Vicente we could catch a bus and carry out more interviews that afternoon, but they didn't have contact with anyone and weren't too happy with the security situation there so we ended up taking the afternoon off. Unfortunately as Friday morning is market day in San Sebastian that was the end of our interviews - we had only managed to do 19, which we considered very borderline for drawing meaningful conclusions, but we didn't have many options open to us.

Before leaving San Sebastian we did however squeeze in something different. We'd been talking to Franco and Jerry for weeks about the possibility of doing a demonstration of the solar cooker and rocket stove in a community that doesn't use them and then asking people's opinions of the two alternatives to traditional firewood for cooking. What we didn't realise is that Franco already had solar cooker project in San Sebastian, so instead of giving an introductory demonstration of the device it turned into a full-blown training session cooking fish, and then a discussion of the advantages of the cooker....this is obviously important for the solar cooker project but unfortunately somewhat scuppered our plans - it was clear that the women felt we were testing them to recall everything Franco had told them when we asked their opinions on the benefits of the solar cooker and were very cagey about disadvantages (even, for example, that it only works when the sun's shining!) so the data we gathered was somewhat dubious. It also meant that by the time we got a chance to demonstrate the Rocket stove to the group of 15 most of them had had enough after two hours of training on solar cookers and wanted to go home. Added to that we were given damp wood to light the stove with, which made our job a lot harder, but amazingly (admittedly after someone had given us some dry wood to light it with) a number of the villagers asked us where they could buy a Rocket stove or when REDES would start distributing them in San Sebastian, which was very gratifying as we felt that the demonstration had been a bit of a disaster.