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.
sábado, 12 de septiembre de 2009
Psuedo-seismologists
The second week of Seb's stay with us was action-packed and a welcome break from stove surveys. On the monday Seb and Steph visited a comunity with REDES' barra de castilla houses to carry out a few interviews with the owners and do a technical assesment of the buildings, then on Tuesday and Friday we were in Suchitoto making our adobe stove, returning for a meeting with Edwin, the structural engineer who's carried out an assessment of the design's earthquake resistance. It was certainly the most relaxed technical meeting I've ever had (accompanied by a bottle of rum!) but it was very useful for Seb to get the details of Edwin's analysis and three hours later we stopped talking engineering and moved onto politics and music - unfortunately Douglas' wife didn't believe him when he got home and claimed he'd been working with us in the office until 1am, even though it was mostly true!
On Wednesday morning we had something entirely different planned - a conference on seismology. We were expecting it to be held in a faculty building, swarming with students, so were somewhat surprised when Douglas drove us to a residential area - the home of the Permanent Committee for Risk Management (Mesa Permanente para la Gestion de Riesgos.) It turned out that there were only about 5 other delegates, none of whom were engineers so whenever one of the professors giving presentations wanted an engineer's viewpoint we would be put on the spot - Seb and Douglas, despite being the only ones with degrees in civil engineering somehow got away scot-free! The presentations were excellent though and very interesting, the first was a detailed introduction to the seismic history of El Salvador, starting off with the earthquake in 1915 and working up to the the most recent ones in 1986 and 2001, including explanations of their causes and why El Salvador is so prone to earthquakes. This was followed by a study on using anomalous CO2 and SOx emissions to predict volcanic erruptions - the current verdict is that should be possible, but at the moment they can only identify what consists of an anomaly after the erruption has occurred! Finally there was a double session on a Central American initiative to model the most likely earthquake scenarios for all of the countries involved and then predict the resulting economic and social damage to help encourage governments to develop emergency relief plans and to improve the quality of housing, the majority of which is still adobe.
On Thursday we were back in the field, visiting San Jose de Costa Rica (Cuscatlan, El Salvador), not to be confused with the capital of Costa Rica which is also called San Jose! Its a truly beautiful village perched on a ridge overlooking the volcanic crater lake Ilopango, where Seb was lucky enough to have worked in 2005 building the barra de castilla houses and therefore was particularly keen to return and interview his old friends. The highlight of the day for me was undoubtedly the adventure Seb and I embarked upon to find one of the beneficiaries who lived on a pineapple farm. He thought he could remember where we had to go, but after half an hour of scrambling up and down hills, between prickly pineapples and then getting lost in a coffee plantation we were about ready to give up...we then hailed a guy cutting firewood further up the hill who told us that our man no longer lived there and the house was in ruins - we carried on looking for it but eventually gave up. Frustratingly the next house we went to told us that he knew exactly where the house was and that it was certainly still occupied, but by then it was getting dark and time to head home.
On Wednesday morning we had something entirely different planned - a conference on seismology. We were expecting it to be held in a faculty building, swarming with students, so were somewhat surprised when Douglas drove us to a residential area - the home of the Permanent Committee for Risk Management (Mesa Permanente para la Gestion de Riesgos.) It turned out that there were only about 5 other delegates, none of whom were engineers so whenever one of the professors giving presentations wanted an engineer's viewpoint we would be put on the spot - Seb and Douglas, despite being the only ones with degrees in civil engineering somehow got away scot-free! The presentations were excellent though and very interesting, the first was a detailed introduction to the seismic history of El Salvador, starting off with the earthquake in 1915 and working up to the the most recent ones in 1986 and 2001, including explanations of their causes and why El Salvador is so prone to earthquakes. This was followed by a study on using anomalous CO2 and SOx emissions to predict volcanic erruptions - the current verdict is that should be possible, but at the moment they can only identify what consists of an anomaly after the erruption has occurred! Finally there was a double session on a Central American initiative to model the most likely earthquake scenarios for all of the countries involved and then predict the resulting economic and social damage to help encourage governments to develop emergency relief plans and to improve the quality of housing, the majority of which is still adobe.
On Thursday we were back in the field, visiting San Jose de Costa Rica (Cuscatlan, El Salvador), not to be confused with the capital of Costa Rica which is also called San Jose! Its a truly beautiful village perched on a ridge overlooking the volcanic crater lake Ilopango, where Seb was lucky enough to have worked in 2005 building the barra de castilla houses and therefore was particularly keen to return and interview his old friends. The highlight of the day for me was undoubtedly the adventure Seb and I embarked upon to find one of the beneficiaries who lived on a pineapple farm. He thought he could remember where we had to go, but after half an hour of scrambling up and down hills, between prickly pineapples and then getting lost in a coffee plantation we were about ready to give up...we then hailed a guy cutting firewood further up the hill who told us that our man no longer lived there and the house was in ruins - we carried on looking for it but eventually gave up. Frustratingly the next house we went to told us that he knew exactly where the house was and that it was certainly still occupied, but by then it was getting dark and time to head home.
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)