Stovetec

Just received the new Stovetec 2 door charcoal / wood burning rocket stove ( see one door version in my stove slide show) to test! Stovetec has given it to me free in exchange for my translation of their manuals into French, and then into Haitian creole with a great deal of help from Timo and friends in Haiti!
It will be really interesting to do some cooking with the dead branches that are all over my land here in STX and local charcoal similar to that made in Haiti. Then on my next trip I can demo it there like the first one, and hope it will also inspire people to use rocket stove principles -like in the school and cob stoves we've built, saving time & fuel, and causing much less pollution, danger, ill-health from smoke, and deforestation!

Mandy's Cards - receive 2 with $25 or more donation to Haiti fund.

Omega VI Mill.

I'm currently raising money to send a BURR MILL to Au Centre Village in November! This is a kind of grinder that can be used to husk coffee, grind coffee, grind maize, make flour from dried breadfruit and other crops, and make peanut butter and other pastes! It is hand powered and I am also sending the metal parts for a pedal-powered mounting that can be built in the village (it could even be generator powered in  the future).

The villagers are walking an hour each way to the market town to have their crops milled, carried in sacks on their heads, and of course they have to pay the miller. The Burr Mill will save them the journey and the percentage of the crop they give to the mill will go to feed the 170 schoolchildren their lunches (often their only proper meal), and to purchase additional schoolbooks.
The mill is made by a small non-profit specializing in compatible technologies for the Third World, is very simple and robust, in use in 20 countries, and costs $350. The pedal kit and shipping to Miami will cost another $100, and the normally very difficult and expensive shipping from there to Port au Prince, Haiti, is partly donated by a humanitarian pilot! Customs fees and transportation to the village are also being donated. 
IF YOU CAN HELP, PLEASE CONTACT ME - THIS DEVICE CAN SAVE LIVES, INCREASE SELF SUFFICIENCY AND FAMILY INCOMES, AND HELP Haiti Community Support's LA RENAISSANCE SCHOOL!
Donors of over $25 will receive a set of Mandy's beautiful West Indian watercolor portrait cards. 
100% raised today (22 OCT 09)! Next one ALREADY 50%  FUNDED... then maybe a solar pump?

Vévé Dream - watercolor 12 x 18 $700

Poem on leaving

Long before the red mud staining the soles of my feet is gone,

Days before I've eaten the last great flat circle of cassava bread you gave me,

Even while I still have that sweet ache inside -

I'm back in the concrete jungle.

Nobody here says hello in the street

No smell of coffee roasting and burnt sugar tablette.

No hibiscus hedges along footpaths

No chickens underfoot.

No tidy schoolchildren hurry past in neat gingham uniforms

All the children here, so few compared to Haiti, are captive in cars,

Whisked away, out of sight into a life of alien electronics.

There is no trash here, no crowding,

If there are slums they are far away

No music in the streets, no-one dances going by.

Almost everyone has enough or too much of everything

Taking no joy in it - we don't enjoy plenty if we never knew the lack.

I'll keep you alive in my mind, and Haiti -

So that I don't forget how little I need,

How much I can give from the surplus

Not only material things but what  I gain

In knowing the broader world but seeking the simpler.

Ti Reve (watercolour/ink on clayboard) 10 x 10 $400-

Vévé Girl 12 x 14 ink $250

All sketches available - 25% of price supplies needed equipment in Haiti. 

Endless turned earth where the yams are planted each to its own dip in the red ground, each with it's supporting pole like a soldier, there is strength in numbers but also the voracity of locusts.

Subsistence - kay where the reddish children, hair in twists yellowing at the tips, stand bunched in doorways, one for each year of a farmer's married life.

Patience - the mule hobbled in another century.

Nothing here was made in a factory at first glance, except the plastic baubles in the little girls' hair and the father's broken sandals.

The children are too shy to say "Bon Swa" but as we go down hill a small voice from behind the piled rock fence calls "Blan, blan" and a hand waves from the obscurity of the mud and thatch house. Twenty metres square perhaps, and the only chair is child-sized - here no-one has ever had enough.

kay - house

bon swa - bonsoir

blan - white or foreign person

Heavy Rain in May

Inside the house is as dark as at five in the morning, with the same infrequent squawks of chickens and the odd shout from the road, almost no-one is out. All day the nieces lie huddled under the covers, sleeping or murmuring on their cell-phones. An odor of kerosene pervades the corridor, it was used to light the charcoal fire - there is a big plate of rice and some boiled cabbage at noon. There may be something else before dark, or maybe not. The first day of rain everyone ate more to ward off the chill, now they are too bored even to cook or eat. All the clothes are damp, and the walls sweaty to the touch. 

Poultry, cats and small boys huddle disconsolate on the gallery. The spare buckets and pans are up in the roof-space, catching drips, but the wind shakes the house enough that coffee beans are dislodged from between the rough-sawn ceiling boards, they may have been there for years, this house was for a long time a grocery store and coffee depot.

Outside a low cloud descends, from time to time, and becomes thin mist. The ground is sodden but the paths no longer slippery with red mud, since only the stones remain. 

The occasional house has a small gathering on the porch, most are shuttered until better weather. Nobody came from the market today or brought the bread in a big basket on his head, nobody sang as they usually do. 

There was a hiatus, when it looked like clearing, and we were briefly animated, then more rain and the torpor of chilled reptiles used to the sun.

Mme Bob stirs herself to make a hot dish of black beans, very soupy with the heaviest dumplings in the world! I give the eldest niece, who is citified and bored, an English lesson - concerning jobs, introductions, and the placement of objects... above, behind, etc.  The rain is so loud on the tin roof and her intonations so different that I cannot always tell if she is repeating what I've said. 

The domino game on the gallery is now in it's eighth hour, with mostly the same players though they circulate a little.

There is no more kerosene when the lamp runs out, and there hasn't been cooking gas for days. Every chair supports a wet towel or shirt. Piles of small black beans wait to be sifted free of chaff and dust - it cannot be done in the rain - from a flat woven grass tray one shakes and flicks away from the body, out in the garden.

Sometimes the rain is so loud I can't distinguish French from Creole, or maybe the distinction is blurring?

I was thinking what a peaceful village this is... in spite of the weather, the boredom, the availability of the clairin (local high-proof rum) - there are no fights, no arguments at the dominoes, no shouting.... it has rained about 20 inches in three days and all the roads are washed out, including the half-built lifeline to the outside world everyone has carried rocks to, for the last three weeks. Down on the coast people are swept away and drowned in the floods, we hear via the tinny radio and a few phone calls.

Everyone is wearing everyone else's clothes to keep warm, just as they find them - I have Timo's football jacket, he has his mother's floppy blue felt gardening hat on, the young men have T-shirts tied round their heads like banditos, and Clairyanne, the youngest niece, goes all day under a red towel like a statue of the Virgin.

It is three days outside of life for us, but in other houses in the village a grandmother living alone with a small child must go out and find another yam to boil, keeping the fire alight all the time as there are no matches, a man has spoken to no-one but his toddler and the memory of his dead wife so far this week, a family are coughing together in a heap of damp rags as their mud and field-stone walls dissolve visibly below the holes in the tin roof.

The LOW TECH STOVES slideshow shows the main stages of building several types of simple stove during my two trips... Note: click on slideshows to view full size on Picasaweb!

The stoves cost virtually nothing to build, can be adapted to  different sizes of kitchen/family, using 60% less fuel they save biomass eg. wood, charcoal, dried maize cobs, save collection time, and distance travelled in search of fuel. (This can be a safety issue for women and children e.g. in Somalia where they are frequently attacked outside refugee camps). They use smaller fuels - meaning dead and fallen branches rather than cutting whole trees. These stoves make less smoke and particulates saving people's lungs and polluting the air less. They cook hotter and faster than open fires. They are safer - fewer women and children are burned as the fire is enclosed. The cob rocket stoves are even portable.

It was wonderful to be able to go back, make improvements, try the stoves out, exchange recipes, see them in use and help ensure acceptance of most of the innovations. Let's hope the cob stoves are now dry and being tried out!

Madame Clem

Staying with Madame Clem.

The wisdom of 84 years close to the soil surrounds her, though she is almost never still, the first to rise in the morning, she spends her day cooking, tending the banana-grove, a small bean crop, her herbs, missing nothing that happens in this household of at least 16 people.  Probably not a lot escapes her in the district of several thousand... with nine children, and more grandchildren and great-grandchildren than bear counting, she still has time for the most distant cousin, the stray foreigner, the kitten venturing for the first time from next door. 

Her face is deeply creased but not wrinkled, her knuckle-joints are scarcely more enlarged than someone of 60; she stands up from her ten-inch-high cooking chair with the ease of a young woman, and goes down from the gallery at the front of the house with alternate feet, never hesitating and placing both feet on a step as the old usually do. She loves a new hat or shirt and twirls it like a girl, still tall, still a queen. What burned away in eighty cycles of this troubled earth left her the peaceful strength of ages  - was she born one of the wise ones? Will I achieve the same in any measure?

We sat, not speaking much, for a while in her smoke-filled wattle-and-daub outside-kitchen, I on the old log by the door where half the village stops, from dawn to dusk, for advice or tea or left-overs. She shifts a pot of pois-noirs, the soupy black bean dish that is almost  the daily menu, and stirs coffee beans as they cool in the broken pot she has just used to roast them, tilted on it's side so none are lost through the hole in the bottom. The chicken coop is behind the fire, where the hens roost at night, otherwise this room contains some loose firewood, some bark and shavings in a box the hens also roost in, a few spare stones to prop the basket she carries out from the house daily, with her pots, a knife, some coarse rock salt... There is the small chair and the "pilon" mortar and pestle for the coffee  and cocoa, and of course the three-stone fire with the three logs that are pushed inwards to the centre  as they burn. It's only semi-light despite the open spaces at the tops of the walls and the wavering shafts of sun where there are holes in the tin roof. 

When someone called my name I stood up to go out  - Mme Clem waved to me to wait, and lifted a broken pot from an old shelf, handing me a just-layed white egg from behind it, calling me "sister" as she pushed me gently out the door. Even I, virtually a professional expatriate, am overcome for a minute with the feeling of being at home... This is the centre of the family, the village, the heart.