Aid Africa

Peter Keller and I with all of the stoves we made!

I met Peter Keller at a small coffee shop in town awhile ago. I don’t normally go to this coffee shop because it is where so many white people like to hang out, drink coffee, and use the wireless internet and generator power and I try to mingle more with the locals, I guess. But I see the good of meeting people in a place like that. I actually like going there now! A lot of networking is going on in there. My first two times there, I have made important contacts. Peter invited me to go out in the field with his NGO, Aid Africa. He is the executive director.

The rocket stove uses much less fuel and is smokeless.

Aid Africa is involved in many projects in the Gulu area, but the one I was going to spend the day doing with them is the making and distributing of rocket stoves to a village about two hours away. The smoke from cooking fires in a hut is a leading cause of blindness in women and children and a real serious issue in Northern Uganda. Also, many women and children suffer from lung diseases because of all the exposure to cooking smoke.

Every hut gets two stoves.  This is step one of the mudding process.

Step two is surrounding it with mud.

And this is the finished product!

Rocket stoves are a smokeless, low fuel burning stove. It is good for the environment because it uses a fraction of the fuel necessary in cooking compared with open fires, and they also do not put smoke into the air. The bricks are made locally out of local materials. The clay of the brick is mixed with organic materials like straw and sticks. When the bricks are fired, the organic material burns away and the bricks are left with many small little holes like a sponge. They are fragile, light, and can even float in water. When 6 of the bricks are wired together in a circle, it makes a great smokeless stove. It is then mudded over and affixed inside the cooking hut and the hut is now a smokeless cooking area. Every hut gets two stoves. The pictures will explain it better than I can describe it. We built 58 rocket stoves, and took pictures and video of one stove being mudded in for promotional purposes. If you really want more information about Aid Africa or the rocket stoves, you can check out their website at http://www.aidafrica.net/.

This is my gift of eggs!

Even though I was just an observer and helper, I was awarded by one of the village ladies a gift of eggs this time. I actually took the eggs and traded them later for a fruit called tugu. It is a very fibrous, stringy fruit that falls off of a tree that looks like a coconut tree. It is eaten like sugar cane is eaten. You bite a bit off, chew the flavor of it out of the fibers, and then spit it out. It was delicious. Now I need to get packed for my departure to China tomorrow.

This Rotary CLub has given lots of money to Aid Africa.