91 Guatemalan Stoves by the Wall

Guatemalan family with their new stove 

Since our mission was about stoves - sort of - I should write about stoves. To recap what I wrote previously, Marco with Hands for Peacemaking insists the mission is not about the stoves, it's about building friends and lasting relationships, and sharing God's love.

But you get eight guys together, break them into teams of two, and send them out in the field to reach a certain goal and it becomes more about the stoves than I think anyone would like to admit.

We received our Aller stove put-together training at the big shop behind the mission house in Barillas. Thankfully the disassembled stoves were already waiting for us at each household in Xoxlac. The Hands for Peacemaking staff had trucked in about 100 stoves to the village and with the help of the locals hauled them to each house - not such an easy feat considering that some of these houses were either way, way up or way, way down steep and rocky trails well away from the core village. Just hiking to each one was often a challenge.

Bearnabay hauling tools up the hill

Each team was assigned a village guide, and this guide, very porter-like, would haul our hefty tool bag to each house on their shoulders. In the tool bag would be hammers, electric drills, levels, rasps, files, nut drivers, wrenches, two kinds of wire, tin snips, screw drivers, a hack saw, a tape measure and other assorted weaponry.

So we'd arrive at each hut, announce ourselves to the family with a friendly buenos días, maybe give the kids some of the candy John had purchased and get to work. Most of the huts had a separate cooking building so that is where the stove would go.

Lying around somewhere on the premises would be the stove fire box. Inside or somewhere around each box was a package of nuts, bolts of two sizes, and washers; four stove legs; two shelves, shelf braces, three sheet metal stove pipes, three pipe elbows, a top piece we called the "sombrero," soft metal loop pipe braces, six protector strips, wire mesh, a set of pre-cut bricks to line the inside of the fire box, the stove top and a handle to lift the burners. The homeowner was responsible for supplying two boards on which to rest the stove.

Larry assembles a stove

Each team developed slightly different processes for putting the works together. Some would build the stove mostly outside where it was bright and light, first carefully measuring the door to ensure that it would fit through once the shelves were installed. Others would do most of the stove assembly on the darker inside, which was the case mostly with Doug and I. Typically Doug, our guide Bearnabay and I would set to work bolting the stove together while our friendly assistant from Hands for Peacemaking, Dahgo, would begin the  ground leveling operation (we decided we'd be fine with letting him do it after our little experience with fire ants). The idea was that the ground would be level and the stove put together about the same time. It didn't always work that way, but usually pretty close. In almost all instances the tightly-fitting brick liners would be too tight and someone would have to file down the bricks until they would fit. Again, good jobs for Dahgo and Bearnaby, neither of whom spoke any English. 

In a typical installation Bernabay, left, and Dahgo put protective wire mesh
around the braced stove pipe after assembly.

While that was going on we'd go to work installing the stove pipe. One elbow would go out the back of the stove to attach to a pipe going straight up the inside of the house. Another elbow would go to a vertical pipe that normally would go straight under the open eve (sometimes the eve wasn't all that open and we'd have to improvise a bit). The top horizontal pipe would then go out to the roof, where another elbow would be placed and attached to the third vertical pipe. The horizontal piece would always have to be cut to match the distance between the side of the house and the roof, a tedious task that both Doug and I learned quickly to hate. To fit the top vertical piece we (almost always Doug I should say) would stand on something high to notch a small piece out of the tin roof as a way of securing the pipe. We'd secure the pipe to the inside of the house and eves with A-nails over the pipe brace. Sometimes, if the hut was particularly shoddy or made with soft wood, finding a place to put these braces was a challenge. Occasionally we'd fortify the roof or the eves with bailing wire, which will be fine in the short-term but will likely rust with heavy rains. 

Doug wrestles with roof installation

As soon as the top piece was on, we'd ask the lady of the house to light a fire. Then we'd show her and the family the smoke outside. Before leaving we would have a little blessing ceremony and present each family with an adult, Spanish-language Bible and a kids' Bible if kids were around. We'd also snap their photo by the stove so we could print it with our portable printer and present it to them in the closing ceremony to help mark this important day.

Each house was different so there was no "one size fits all design," but we became better and better as the job went on. The first day we ran into a number of problems early so only built four stoves, including the first two in the same location. The second day we installed six, three in the morning and three after lunch. On the third day we managed seven, and the fourth day, which was just a half-day, we eked out three more. Jon Schmick and Maxx Snyder had the best day - they installed nine stoves one one day and I believe eight on another. Other teams had varying degrees of success. At the end of each day we'd rap about what worked best and try to adopt best practices from one another.

Fire in the hole!

All in all we collectively put together 91 stoves! Not bad considering the previous year's team, which assembled a slightly different model but had six more people, installed 62. Our initial goal was 100, but no one really expected we'd do that. Marco had to make a run to Barillas to sign some papers and picked up more stoves to make a total of 104. By now, the villagers who had helped us were well trained on stove installation and would assemble the rest themselves with tools left behind. Hands for Peacemaking will follow up and make sure the villagers know how to periodically clean and maintain stoves too. 

Trying out the new stove

Now you're cookin' grandma!