Day 1 Stoving in Guatemala

Today was our first day working on stoves. I had breakfast with my family and my host dad pointed out that we could finally see the volcano Fuego clearly from our house. Sure enough, when I looked out the window, I finally saw the view of the peak of the volcano (which had been eluding me since I got here on Saturday). An aside: I really like our street! It's so cute.
On the walk to the coffee shop where all the volunteers meet, I took a few photos,

then caught the bus with the other volunteers to our work site. We rode to a small area in the hills called Santa Maria. On the bus to town, Mike was filming out the window and one of the GVI staff members asked him to stop. This does not bode well for our video project.

The school and was really cute! The volunteers on the teaching project got ready for class and then Mike and I left for our work sites.

I couldn't take any photos of the walk because Santiago, the community rep requested that we not take photos on the project at all, which was too bad. I wish these issues had been ironed out with our organizers and GVI before we arrived, I think it's really important that we use video and photos to show why volunteers are needed, plus potential volunteers want to see where they'll be working.
Still, I totally understand the desire to avoid making the locals feel like they're on display. Many times those fears are unfounded, but sometimes they aren't. I've seen more than one photo of a local person clearly looking peeved because some idiot foreigner has a camera pointed at them, however I think a lot of it has to do with simple manners. Asking permission, seeing when someone wants you to stop taking photos, taking photos from a far enough distance that you cannot identify faces and general courtesy helps assure you don't insult the locals. So whether or not to take photos is a tough issue, and again, I think the discussion should have begun between the higher-up's before Mike and I got here.

STOVING

Mike and I are each working with a mason at separate houses, that way we can build two stoves. The family I'm helping consists of a mother, a father, and a daughter. They cook in one room and sleep in the other. I decided that as long as I'm taking photos of things and not people, I'm ok, so I snuck in a few! But first things first:

Why we're building stoves: Families in rural areas often cook on the ground over open fires (the photo to the left shows where this family normally cooks). Children sometimes fall and get burns or people in the family develop respiratory problems because there isn't a proper way to get rid of the smoke.





You can see how black the walls are, this is from smoke. Think about the inhabitants of this house breathing that every day.

As you can see, we really are building this stove from scratch, here's the before.

All we had was some bricks and concrete. We mixed our cement right on the ground outside of the house. It's bare bones, but I loved seeing how it all works!
My job is to help mix the cement, truck it from outside to inside for the mason, and to soak bricks in water and hand them to him. Tough stuff ;) The mason deals with the real work with the measuring, the leveling, etc. The little girl who lives there is Paula. She helped hold the iron while I cut it with a file, which required more than a little elbow grease. When I was visibly struggling, she kept saying things like "just a little more,"and "almost done." She was so cute! The whole family is nice, when I first arrived, the mother had a snack ready for me.

We went back to the school for lunch with the volunteers, then back up to the house for more work, where I was surprised to see how far things were moving along!
We had to let the bricks dry, tomorrow we will finish up.