El Salvador, 2009

Bachelors and best men...our return to Berlin

2009-09-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

Our last "week" of fieldwork was spent in Berlin - a coffee growing area that's pleasantly cool as its about 1000m above sea level. The contrast with other areas in the amount we got done was impressive - we only spent two days there, but we had two guys from the city council assigned to help us and show us around, along with a car and driver, which meant that we were able to do 24 interviews, despite the fact that they were distributed in ones and twos all over the province, and we visited almost ten houses where the stoves were unoccupied as they were either unfinished or only recently completed.

Tuesday morning was an early start - leaving with Douglas at 5am to get to the City Council when it opened at 7, as we expected to have to wait for at least two hours before they got anything done. Amazingly when we got back from a tasty breakfast Toño was already waiting for us, had found out that we weren't going to get a car that morning and was waiting for a helper, Reynaldo, to turn up and help show us around. These two ended up showing us around tirelessly for the next 48 hours, first of all in houses REDES had built around the city with improved stoves, and then after lunch and on Wednesday in remote villages all over Berlin municipality. They were great fun and made the trip into the success it was - not least with the endless banter about how Reynaldo wanted to find an English girl to marry, which soon developed into the plans for his wedding with Steph...I think she was secretly gutted when he didn't come back after lunch for their arranged meeting at the church to finalise things!

Berlín is a beautiful municipality, spread across the slopes of a volcanoe, and we had some great opportunities to see the scenery from the back of the pick-up while driving hither and thither to visit communities. The interviews produced some interesting results - for example REDES gave the families no training whatsoever in the use or maintanence of the cookers, something that we were shocked by as we expected them to be more clued-up than that, its certainly one of the things that we're going to recommend they change as a result of this investigation. The design in question is the "3 hornillas" - it has a large circular hole at the front for cooking with a comal or a large pot for maize, frijoles etc. and two smaller holes at the back with sheet metal covers for cooking with smaller pots.

It turns out that this design is wildly inefficient - it does use less wood than an open fire with a tripod pot-stand, but only by 10%. In contrast the Rocket had an average saving of 60%, and the "plancha" design of stove an impressive 50% reduction. The main problem with the "3 hornillas" seems to be what we expected - it has a very high thermal mass as it's large and made primarily from bricks and mud (although it does also contain ash) and one of people's main complaints was that it takes a long time to heat up, which uses lots of firewood.

On Thursday we had managed to organise a trip to Sonsonate to visit the Stove Team International factory there thats making the brand of Rocket stove that we've been testing, the eCocina. It was an excellent trip, very interesting to see the processes that the stoves go through, and also some of the other designs, including on we'd sighted on YouTube and wanted more information about. It's based around a rocket-elbow combustion chamber, but T-shaped and made from reinforced concrete. The cooking surface is a large plate that can easily be used for tortillas or pupusas, and there are two removable metal covers which reveal "burners" for cooking with pots. All in all it seems to answer the problems we have with the Rocket - namely that its too small for large families and can only accomodate one pot at a time, and at a price of $125 it should be affordable for future REDES projects - the only drawback is that its still made in a factory so the opportunities for involving the beneficiaries in the contruction process are limited to building a base so that it sits at a comfortable working height.

We had planned to return to Suchitoto to finish our adobe Rocket stove with a layer or reinforced concrete, but unfortunately it doesn't look like I'll get a chance to do that now - first I went and got ill, and then this week has been spent writing the presentation on our investigation which we're giving to a combination of engineers, site managers and directors of REDES on Friday - wish us luck!

Oh and to finish - a photo of a traffic-directing clown. Why? I don't know - you tell me!

Shock absorbers in San Sebastian

2009-09-12T15:44:00.001-07:00

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.

Psuedo-seismologists

2009-09-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

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.

How to build a Rocket stove - a step by step guide

2009-08-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

One of the problems that I've already mentioned about the solar cooker is shared by the Rocket stove, namely that the beneficiary families cannot be involved in its construction and therefore there is a risk that they will neither use nor maintain the cookers. On top of that there are a couple of possible improvements that would be interesting to try out - namely having separate and sloping fuel and air entrances to try and prevent people from choking the stove with too much fuel and hot ash and coals. The idea is that the fuel entrance slopes downwards to reduce the need for near-constant attention while cooking as the wood will "self-meter", falling down the chute as it burns at the tips of the sticks. Another benefit is that the stove can be used with charcoal, unlike the standard Rocket stove. The addition of a separate, upwards-sloping entrance for air should guarantee that sufficient oxygen enters the combustion chamber, while also helping to automatically empty the stove of ash as the fuel is burnt - thats the theory anyway!

The new design is the brainchild of Jerry, a technical genius who works for the CRC in Suchitoto. Some of his other ongoing projects include plans to install a micro-hydro plant to provide power for a community hospital and school with REDES, solar powered water pumps, biogas digestors and endless improvements for the Rocket stove - including an interesting idea for a hybrid Rocket, lit with biogas to help heat it up and burn damp wood as well as replacing the gas cookers that are often used for quick meals or hot drinks. Another idea of his is for a Rocket with two or three burners to accomodate multiple pots, or a large comal for cooking tortillas for extended families - there's lots of potential for REDES to adapt the designs to suit different families.

Yesterday Steph and I caught a bus up to Suchitoto to experiment with these ideas for the new design (and on the way she was serenaded by three teenage lads who happened to be carrying a guitar and ukulele with them!) We were somewhat lacking in the resources you might have in the UK for prototyping, so had to make do with recycling an old polystyrene board (ironically showing information about a CRC project building "Armenia" stoves which are mostly disused now) and some AIDS awareness posters, along with a cardboard box scavenged from the local shop for a mold. The idea was to stiffen the box with the polystyrene sheeting, which also serves to separate the wet adobe from the thin cardboard walls with the plasticised posters theoretically stopping water from seeping out...Jerry rather optimistically hopes to reuse this mold time and again for future stoves! The combustion chamber and various inlets for fuel and air are formed from empty drinks bottles filled with paper or water for stiffening and later removed once the cooker has dried.

The stove is primarily constructed from adobe, which requires clay-rich mud, so we were armed with a spade and pickaxe and sent off into the garden with a dustpan-sized sieve to produce a bucketload of fine-grained mud. Trust me, its a lot harder than it sounds as the clay makes the soil stick together in lumps and roll up into hard little balls that don't fit through our toy sieve. An hour or so later (and having provided a tasty feast for a swarm of mosquitos that suddenly appeared out of nowhere) we finally had enough mud to go with the sawdust that Jerry had been hoarding for months to make our adobe mix. The sawdust is a vital, if surprising, ingredient - ideally the finished stove would be fired to burn out all of the sawdust (any fine-grained organic material can be used) leaving a porous material not dissimilar to pumice. The trapped pockets of air provide the insulation vital for an efficient stove by reducing its effective thermal mass (the heat is confined in the combustion chamber rather than heating the whole body of the stove as happens in many designs of "improved" adobe stoves.)

After creating a dry mix of approximately 50:50 mud to sawdust we got to work on the remaining mud, adding water to make quite a moist adobe mix which was daubed around the base and up the sides of the mold to give a smooth surface finish about half a centimetre thick. This was then filled in with the mud/sawdust mix which was made up slightly wetter to ensure that it flows properly around the mold. At this point we ran out of both sawdust and time, so we agreed to return on Friday and rushed off to catch a bus back to San Salvador for our meeting with Seb and Edwin (who carried out the structural analysis of REDES' bahareque house) but thats a story for another time! [To be continued....]

As you've probably noticed Friday's come and gone now, and we now have a cardboard box of mud waiting for us in Suchitoto, slowly drying in the sun. The second day's work on the stove was a little frustrating - endlessly forcing mud through our mangled sieve until we had blistered fingers and decided that we must have enough to finish the stove, only for all of our adobe mix to be swallowed up by the mold without making a noticeable impact! We eventually filled it to a level where we could add the fuel and air chutes - old plastic bottles cut down to size and stuffed with newspaper, then balanced a square of polystyrene on top of the upside-down 2L bottle that forms the combustion chamber to try and stop sticks from sliding straight through and out the air inlet. Over the course of the afternoon we finally managed to fill the whole mould and ended up with a three centimetre cover of adobe at the top, which was a little less than we wanted, but once again we'd run out of time and mud. The mold was then covered in plastic to keep the water off it and left outside to dry in the sun.

Next week we'll return to finish the stove - the mold will be inverted so that our combustion chamber points upwards and hopefully we'll then be able to peel away the cardboard, paper and polystyrene layers of the mold to reveal a perfectly formed, dry adobe cooker! At least thats the idea.... [To be continued....]

Solar cookers - a culinary masterclass

2009-08-24T13:16:00.002-07:00

In addition to the biomass stoves that REDES build as part of their housing projects they also recently started distributing solar cookers to rural communities. There is enormous potential for them here because of the abundant sunshine that El Salvador is lucky enough to have - there have only been two cloudy days in the six weeks I've been here (although there are daily afternoon thunderstorms) and this is supposed to be the rainy season! When we heard that REDES had a solar cooker project we were obviously really interested in finding out more - after all it offers an alternative to all of the improved wood burning stove designs that we're considering.

Our plan for the next two weeks in the communities with REDES stoves near Berlin and San Sebastian has become progressively more complicated - we now plan to interview 10-15 women every other day and invite them to a hands-on demonstration of both the Rocket stove and the solar cooker the following day when we'll ask them more questions about the two alternatives. During our time in Suchitoto we had already received training from the CRC in the use of the Rocket stove, so Monday morning saw us huddled around a rather dull-looking cardboard box in the garden with Franco who's in charge of the project.

The system proved to be incredibly simple to use - an aluminium foil-coated cardboard reflector quickly folds out to produce a quasi-parabolic solar concentrator. The box also holds a large refractive-glass casserole dish and a black pewter bowl which fits inside it snuggly. You stick your food in the black bowl, put that in the casserole dish with a lid on and leave it at the focus of the cooker for an hour or so. Easy!

The thing was that Franco was determined to show off the full potential of the solar cooker so instead of doing something boring like boiling water he produced an eski full of frozen Tilapia and ushered us into the kitchen to cook lunch. Parsley, corriander, garlic, spring onion and tomatoes were dutifully chopped, along with some leaves that he plucked off a weedy bush in the garden, all mixed up together and stuffed into the fish with a squeeze of fresh lime and pinch of salt. The lid went on and we moved on to dessert - chopped plaintain with a sprinkle of sugar and a couple of crushed cinamon sticks.

While our lunch was cooking Franco gave us the presentation that he does for training - an excellent participatory session that got us to identify the advantages of the solar cooker and also what meals it can or can't cook, along with a few pointers for maintenance. Many of the advantages are environmental and related to the reduction in firewood use - less deforestation, air pollution, global warming, stable rainfall patterns, improved soil fertility, protects biodiversity etc. There are also significant health benefits - reduced smoke inhalation prevents respiratory illnesses, less likely to burn oneself cooking and food is steamed rather than fried resulting in better nutrition. Less obviously it could also help to reduce the violent confrontations and sexual abuse of women that can occur when they wander into other people's land in search of scarce firewood.

Nevertheless it's no golden bullet - for a start the cost will prevent widespread use as the Mexican website selling them (http://www.ollasolar.com.mx/olla_solar.php) charges $690 each. REDES has a policy of always requiring some contribution towards the projects it runs from the beneficiaries, preferrably in the form of unskilled labour during the construction phase. This is very important as it helps to foster a sense of ownership over whats built, encouraging families to maintain them and helps to explain the benefits and problems of the technology, all of which help to ensure that the projects are ultimately succesful. Unfortunately this cannot be done with the solar cookers, so instead families are required to contribute $30 for the cookers - a significant sum of money in many rural comunities.

Perhaps a more serious problem is the total cultural change required in using the cookers - a very slow form of cooking which requires careful attention to timing as removing the lid too early to taste the food releases all of the stored heat and delays the meal by an hour or so! Although the elimination of oil for frying has great health advantages it does change the taste and texture of food which could hinder the adoption of the solar cooker. On the upside the pot is heated quite evenly from all sides and the trapped steam makes it impossible to burn food. The cardboard reflector also requires some care to ensure it doesn't get damp and delaminate, both from spillages while cooking and when stored. On balance I think its fair to say that there is huge potential for this project, but it will never totally replace biomass stoves - not least because there's no sun to cook breakfast with! However it does complement the use of an improved wood-burning stove and we hope to spend our last week of fieldwork visiting one of the first communities to receive solar cookers from REDES to make a direct comparison with their other stove projects.

La Carrera de Cintas - El Franco

2009-08-24T13:16:00.001-07:00

After a quiet weekend last time around in San Salvador - partly spent recovering from staying up all night on Friday with the Imperials before they left on Saturday morning, but also including a day trip up to La Puerta del Diablo - The Devil's Door which overlooks the city, followed by an absurd tour of just about every Mall in the city (and trust me there are lots of them!) with a Salvadorean friend from the hostal we were keen not to waste this weekend.

Saturday started with a lazy breakfast before Domingo arrived to take us to Suchitoto. On the way there it emerged that we were actually going to a local festival in the little village of El Franco which he was confident had already finished but thought we'd try anyway...after asking about five different people who all assured us it hadn't finished Domingo was finally convinced, and so we arrived at the Carrera de Cintas - The Belt Race. The basic concept is a simple one - thread a pencil-sized skewer through a keyring hanging on a line overhead. The only tricky part is when you realise you have to do it while galloping past on a horse on a rough mud track! The undoubtable star of the show as far as I was concerned was the guy who did it one handed with his reins tied to his elbow-stub but still managed to win a number of prizes.

I guess that the tradition evolved from some type of courtship ritual - the main prizes (for which the ring in the cintas is smaller - about one centimeter across!) are nominally women, although nowadays they're more likely to be a $5 bill or piece of kitchenware. The Carrera de Cintas coincides with the maize harvest and the whole village turns out to watch the spectacle, along with a DJ for entertainment (loud Reggaeton inevitably), eskies full of cold sodas and beer and hot food. The riding winds down in mid afternoon to allow everyone to get ready for arguably the main event of the day - the evening's dance, where presumably the most successful riders will have flocks of ladies vying for a song together! As for the competitors - they come from all over the municipality, and the star horse of the show had come all the way from Santa Tecla, a suburb of San Salvador a good hour's drive away.

Sunday involved a quick trip down to El Tunco - the most famous Salvadorean surfing beach, which at times seems more like a little piece of Aus than Central America! Seb and I lathered on the suncream before going off to find a couple of long-haired, bronzed lads who were going to be our long-suffering surf instructors for the next hour...amazingly by the end of the lesson I could more or less stand up quite regularly - still quite a bit of practice needed before I tackle the 3m waves out in the deep where we could see surfers weaving up and down the white-topped crests for tens of seconds at a time.

Lunch with the Mayor of Berlin

2009-08-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

The last week has seen a bit of a departure from our project on efficient wood-burning stoves as we've been supporting Seb Kaminski, an engineer from Arup in London, who's visiting for two weeks to lay the groundwork for a structural analysis of REDES' earthquake resistant bahareque houses. Bahareque is a traditional construction method, a type of wattle and daub that uses barra de castilla (a thin bamboo that grows to heights of 5 or 6m) for the woven frame of the walls. REDES' design incorporates a galvanised steel portal frame which is cheaper than using imported timber or bamboo and diagonal bracing with tensile wire. The barra de castilla is then attached the framework and left for a week or so to dry out - the projects are done in a participatory way with each beneficiary family providing someone to work as unskilled labour. Groups of 4 or 5 families work together on all the houses in their group which helps to provide the time needed between phases of construction (eg. for the barra de castilla to dry or the mud walls drying before plastering etc.) The finished houses are whitewashed and then painted by the families, resulting in a "modern" looking house far more desirable than their old adobe houses.

REDES are particularly keen to develop this bahareque design as it is 15% cheaper than the equivalent made from blocks, and more importantly the investment in materials goes to incredibly poor rural areas rather than the rich elite who hold monopolies on the block factories. Additionally it uses a much smaller amount of cement, which is both expensive and environmentally damaging (its production is energy intensive and a major source of industrial carbon dioxide emissions) and barra de castilla is a fast-growing, sustainable and carbon-neutral resource. A structural analysis has already been carried out by an independent local company, but in order to secure international donor funding and governmental support for rolling out a larger bahareque project REDES would like certification from an internationally renowned company, which is where Seb and Arup come in.

As well as a number of technical meetings with the REDES engineers who designed the houses Seb has a questionnaire for families who have participated in the project, so over the course of the fortnight that he's here we will visit three different communities to do a visual assessment of the houses and hear the families' views. As a result we spent last Friday visiting Loma Fria where REDES are currently building rainwater collection tanks for the bahareque houses. It was very interesting talking to the families, the vast majority of whom were delighted with their houses and no longer worried about the threat of earthquakes. For those who don't know, El Salvador suffered two major earthquakes (6-7 on the Richter scale) in 2001 which killed hundreds of people. Everyone we talked to in Loma Fria had their old adobe houses severely damage during the earthquakes, although none of their relatives had died. One of the supposed advantages of bahareque is that it is extremely light and flexible - certainly when compared to the traditional adobe walls with loose blocks and tiled roofs it is easy to see the improvement in the design.

Another advantage of the new houses is their resistance to insects, in particular assasin beetles (los chinches) which tend to live in the nooks and crannies of old adobe houses and emerge at night to bite the sleeping residents. These seemingly harmless bites can transmit Chagas disease - it often goes unnoticed for tens of years, but eventually damages the nervous and digestive systems and can also cause heart failure - something that we are particularly aware of after there was a worry that one of the group from Imperial was showing symptoms, luckily it turned out to be a false alarm.

Nevertheless there are also some problems with these houses - the quality of the welded joints is dubious, most are only spot welded together and their resistance to earthquake loading will be minimal at best. The houses are also prone to surface cracking as the plaster dries so quickly in the roasting heat, and the thin, light walls desirable for earthquakes heat up much more quickly making it uncomfortable to sleep inside during the day. On top of that there's a problem of social acceptance that is harder to overcome than all the technical challenges - some people simply do not want a house made out of mud, whether its been nicely painted or not, and would be much happier with blockwork walls.

Jumping back to Wednesday and the title of the post, we attended the inauguration ceremony of the second phase of a batch of 70 REDES houses in Berlin (where Steph and I will be returning in a couple of weeks time to interview families from the first phase about the stove that came with the house) where the funding has come from Castilla La Mancha with support from a Spanish NGO - Terra Pacifica. It turned out to be a very interesting day listening to the various speeches from all the players - the Mayor and Town Council, comunity leaders, Terra Pacifica and finally REDES.

I also picked up a few pointers on how to get the comunity involved in this type of event - for example reading out the contract for the next phase seemed like a good idea, but perhaps some of the finer legal details could have been omitted! The ceremony was followed by lunch at a little restaurant perched at the top of the hill overlooking the whole valley and Embalse 15 de Septiembre - one of the main hydropower sources for El Salvador. Douglas even managed to rustle up a group of Mariachis to serenade us and celebrate Jose's (one of the Spanish delegation from Terra Pacifica) birthday.

Rocket stoves and roosting chickens – rural Suchitoto.

2009-08-10T16:40:00.000-07:00

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!

La Barra de Santiago

2009-08-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

Sun, sea, sand and surf – what more could you want from a weekend at the beach? Throw in fantastically fresh fish and marshmallows toasted by candlelight and it becomes even harder to beat! But first came Friday night and a trip to Las Leyendas (The Legends) – a popular bar that was crammed full with locals as it was payday and the start of ten days of national holidays! Saturday morning got off to a predictably slow start, not least for Domingo who was driving us and looking distinctly hungover from too much Tequila the night before. We eventually arrived at the beach in time for a late lunch followed by some surfing (strictly speaking we had one board between about six of us) in the famously fearsome waves of the Pacific – Barra de Santiago is used for training the country’s lifeguards. Even as a strong swimmer I was shocked by how powerful the currents were, and quickly found that the only way to escape the towering waves crashing over me was to bodyboard back to shore which was quite some experience!

All romantic notions of an evening lounging around a campfire on the beach were quickly shattered by the storm that started building at 6pm and continued for the next two hours with amazing displays of sheet lightning flashing through the sky. Meanwhile I was comfortably swinging in a hammoc overlooking the beach, enjoying the solitude and trying to take photos of the lightning – I think I’ve finally found something more frustrating and difficult to photograph than butterflies! Candles were brought out when the power went down, and being resourceful engineers we put them to good use after dinner for toasting marshmallows – not quite as good as glowing red embers but less sooty than it sounds!

Sunday morning started with a jog along the beach up to the tip of the spit which Capricho Beach House sits on, a quick dip in the sea and then pancakes for breakfast. After a couple of hours lounging around in the sun reading we set off on a tour of the mangrove swamps, complete with stories of the ghostly white canoe that can sometimes be seen late at night between the mangroves.

We had a lazy late lunch at a little family-run palm-roofed shack near the tip of the barra before celebrating Alex’ 21^st. On our way back from the hostal we somehow managed to recruit an entire family of 12 to help us blowing balloons, so we arrived with a boatful that were promptly whipped off down the estuary by the wind, to be collected by a host of friendly kids....who also eagerly hoovered up all the sweets out of the piñata!

Suchitoto

2009-07-30T09:49:00.002-07:00

In addition to taking on two EWB volunteers every summer, REDES also work with Imperial College on an earthquake-proof housing project, an initiative started after the 2001 earthquake that decimated the country. The upshot of this is that there's a group of 11 civil engineers from Imperial working in Colima, building these houses and with REDES they organise trips away each weekend to see different parts of the country. By Wednesday afternoon (ie my second day at work) Douglas and Domingo had decided that I was clearly bored (still waiting to hear the details of what I'd be doing on Thursday) and so we set off to Colima to meet the 'Imperials' - a friendly bunch who by the end of the afternoon had invited me to join them on Friday for their trip to Suchitoto.

Despite being the capital in colonial times, little remains of the architecture from that time (at least not in comparison to somewhere like Quito) - mostly as a result of the devastating civil war that ravaged the country between 1980 and 1992. Although I knew little beyond the fact that it had occurred before arriving here, the longer I stay the more I appreciate how important it is to know the place's history to start to understand the people.

For dinner we ended up in a touristy restaurant overlooking the town square that sells pupusas - tortillas stuffed with cheese, frijoles and pork, or a combination of all three and (rightly) described by last year's volunteers as tastiest thing in El Salvador! Saturday was spent visiting El Sitio del Cenícero (one of the communities with the new Rocket stove that we might be returning to as part of our fieldwork) which can only be accessed by boat across Lago Suchitlan - formed by a large dam in 1973, which along with two newer prjects provides nearly 60% of the country's power.

REDES are working with the community in a number of ways - providing hydroponic kits for vegetable growing, and water tanks that the village is now using as a fish farm - which provided the tasty Tilapia for lunch, and there are ambitious plans to develop it into a tourist destination with guided walks through the surrounding forest and a fully-functioning restaurant.
We also visited a cave up in the forest thats used as a roost for thousands of bats and a source of guano fertiliser by the locals, who wade in up to the knees wearing gas masks to fill their 50kg
containers before setting off down the near-vertical path back to
the village. This is all part of the rebuilding process following the war - El Cenícero was the site of a massacre by the army during the conflict and the church wall has a powerful mural depicting scenes of villagers being gunned down by helicopters while trying to flee.

On Sunday we visited Guazapa - a guerrilla stronghold during the war. As you walk around its forested hills amongst the remains of trenches and tatus (caves dug into the ground where the rebels would hide in the stifling heat for days at a time) with rusting lengths of barbed wire and discarded shoes everywhere, you can easily imagine how the guerrillas were able to melt into the darkness for every passing helicopter. We were guided by an ex-guerrilla (unusually there were almost equal numbers of male and female combatants) who told horrific stories of her experiences - quaking in terror hidden away in a tatu while thuds from heavy army boots passed overhead, discovering the body of a radio operator who was captured and tortured by the army before being skewered on a wooden spike in the forest and left for dead, the families of women and children who were herded up and gunned down in cold blood for feeding their guerrilla husbands.

Morazán - Mozote and the civil war museum

2009-07-30T09:49:00.001-07:00

My second weekend away promised to be very cheerful – a visit to the remote northeastern corner of the country and the site of some of the worst atrocities during the war. Arriving in Perquín you can easily understand how the secret guerrilla radio station, Radio Venceremos (We Will Win), was able to avoid capture throughout the 12 years of conflict – rugged hills covered in pine forest stretch as far as the eye can see.

The National Museum of the Civil War in Perquín has a fascinating collection of newspaper clippings and photos explaining the history leading up to the start of the conflict in 1980, including the massacre of 30,000 indigenous people in 1932. That was in response to a peasant uprising which attempted to overthrow the powerful elite – something which arguably still hasn’t been achieved. The leftist FLMN won the elections in March but the rich still monopolise everything from supermarkets to fertilisers and cases of corruption on an immense scale are still being discovered.

Elsewhere in the museum are displays of weaponry and bomb-making kits, as well as the room that was used to broadcast Radio Venceremos after the peace accords. Outside we were shown remnants of a helicopter, and told the story of how the guerrillas set a trap for Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa Barrios – the man responsible for the Mozote massacre in 1981.A botched ambush was set up in the mountains, complete with pig’s blood to add a realistic touch, in which the army finally captured Radio Venceremos’ transmitters. Monterrosa was convinced by the fact that they still worked and wouldn’t let his bomb expert check them over, instead he boarded his helicopter to fly the prize back to San Salvador. Once airborne the hidden bomb was detonated blowing him, quite literally, sky high.

On Sunday we visited the site of the Mozote massacre, where more than 1000 villagers were brutally murdered in an attempt to break the will of the guerrillas – babies were thrown into the air and skewered on bayonnets, girls were raped then hacked to pieces and only one villager escaped to tell her horrendous story. The village church has a very moving mural recording the event, as well as plaques with the names and ages of some of the bodies that have been found – more than half of those killed were children, including babies only a few days old.

The weekend wasn’t entirely about the war – after the visit to Mozote we found time to swim in the Rio Sapo, a beautiful mountain river complete with waterfalls and rapids, and basking in the midday sun helped to cheer all of us up after the grim stories of the war.

Better late than never!

2009-07-30T09:48:00.000-07:00

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!