Aprovecho Research Center's present manifestation on planet earth is focused mainly on two independent but interrelated areas. The first is our 40-acre home base near Cottage Grove, Oregon, where we get to play with all our schemes of making the world a more sustainable place. The second is our growing number of international projects working towards building fuel-efficient wood stoves for the 2-billion-plus people on the planet who cook with biomass. As well as consuming large amounts of wood, traditional stoves often smoke a lot, causing numerous health conditions for the user and any innocent bystanders in the immediate environment (i.e., children of users). Much of our funding comes from groups interested in both slowing deforestation and reducing the smoke that increases the probability of respiratory illness, which is the leading cause of death for children under five. Stoves we have designed are presently being built in about 15 countries, mainly in Central America and Africa. They do the cooking for only about 100,000 of those 2 billion in need, but our numbers are growing daily. Our projects vary in detail, from institutional-sized stoves in Africa for tea plantations that feed 40,000 people a day (the plantations, not the stoves) to small family stoves being built and sold outside Jose Cruz's house in Honduras. In all of the projects, we try to follow some common guidelines.
There are two extreme lines of thought in international aid work as to the role westerners such as us Aprovecho consultants should play in the development of the resource-deprived parts of the world. One view contends that we should stay out of the developing world's business, having done enough damage already with the liberalization of markets over the past centuries and the subsequent draining of those countries' resources to our own ends. This viewpoint believes that local communities will decide what is best for themselves, and, if given the chance, will do the right thing. The other extreme believes that we in the resource-inundated world have the experience and the answers to lead the third world down the correct path. At Aprovecho, we fall somewhere in between. While we certainly do not have all the answers as to how stove projects should be run, we do have something that most of my friends in Central America do not have: leisure time, given to us by the inundation of resources, to research the science involved behind the technologies we are working with. For me to refrain from speaking my mind on what I have had the luxury to research, for fear of insulting a community, is a waste of the resources that I have available to me and not helping anyone. Similarly, my friends south of the border have an advantage that I do not have, and that is the daily experience using these technologies and a survival-based need to make these technologies work well. We therefore have struck a balance between the two lines of thought that, so far, is working well for us. Aprovecho plays the role of technical assistance with no qualms about the fact that we have the experience and knowledge of the science behind the technologies along with the ability to learn from the breadth of our projects, spread around the world. But once we are done advising, it is always a local Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that sees the project through on a daily basis and receives the lion's share of the praise or blame for the project's success. Along with this, we made a strong commitment with our funders to continually return to past projects to find out what has worked and what has not, an aspect often missing in relief work.
Enough pontificating, here is a short history and example of one of our projects:
While Aprovecho has been in the stove- building business since its birth some 25 years ago, it has really only been in the last six years that we have had what I would call a rebirth. It was at this time that Larry Winiarski got asked to do a three-week consultancy on a stove project in Honduran Central America being run by Trees Water and People, out of Colorado. As the universe would have it, a hurricane hit Honduras a couple months before the consultancy was to happen, greatly focusing the world's attention on Honduras' needs and giving Peter Scott and myself the impetus to travel the 4,000 miles overland to help out on what was to be the first in a indeterminate line of stove projects. Peter and I were fledgling Appropriate Technology geeks and had the freedom at that time in our lives to spend a bit of our own money as well as some raised by our members and turn a three- week consultancy that probably would not have amounted to much into a six- month pilot project. This would turn out to be one of our most successful endeavors and set the stage for the myriad projects we now have. Because international projects are often competing with many other groups for support, they are often working on a shoestring budget and funds tend to go to those who will do it for less. Also, I have seen a somewhat insidious tendency in some international aid to not return to the possibility of past failures. A part of international aid work is to look generous to the folks back home, and returning to failed projects just does not do for that end. From the start, we made an agreement with our funders that we would only start these projects if we could return to learn from and correct our mistakes. While it has been hard at times returning to a community we had come to love, not knowing if we created a monster or not, this commitment to return has worked out incredibly for us, and has resulted in our projects being rated by third party groups such as the European Union as among the most successful aid projects in Central America.
The stove we developed in Honduras has come to be known as the Justa Stove, named after Dona Justa Nunez, a matriarch and our guide in the first community we worked in. This stove works well as a multipurpose stove for cooking tortillas as well as multiple pots, and has received reports of saving up to two-thirds of the fuel previously used in their traditional stoves. We have now been returning to this project in Honduras to work with the local NGO Ahdesa at least once a year for the past six years, and Ahdesa is pretty much self-sufficient now in running that project. While this stove has been an incredible success, it has some down sides that we hope to address in our present work in Honduras. While it is great for tortillas and multi-pot cooking, it is not as ideal as possible for a single pot cooking situation. It also costs about $40 in materials, which puts it out of the price range for the majority of Hondurans. Also, while it is an aesthetically pleasing stove, it takes about 4 hours to build, and this limits the number of stoves we are able to put out to about 2,000-3,000 stoves a year. Our next step in Honduras will be developing a simpler and inexpensive stove that should cost as little as $5, be more efficient for single pot cooking, and be producible hopefully by the hundreds per day. We just got a $130,000 grant from the EPA to make this a reality, so you will have to keep in touch with us to see how it goes.
Mike writes: "Mike Hatfield grew up in Roseburg, OR and presently lives outside Cottage Grove. He has worked for seven years as an international stove consultant and appropriate technology instructor at Aprovecho Research Center. Among the primary focuses of study about which he claims to have at least a modicum of expertise/experience include bio-diesel and straight vegetable oil use in diesel vehicles, bike repair, solar hot water heating, fuel efficient biomass use, composting toilets, and passive solar architecture/natural building. Also on the list of topics he feels free to blather about are small-scale water and photovoltaic systems, water catchment, alternatives to electric refrigeration, and solar dehydration."
©2004 Talking Leaves
Late Summer/Fall 2004
Volume 14, Number 3
A Day in the Life: The Many Faces of Eco-Community