Life In The Field

Graham Lewsey

I have just returned from 1 week as a volunteer in Copan which is in Honduras, ten minutes away from the Guatemala border.

The week has been spent building a brick stove for an Indigenous Maya family in San Rafael. Their house is built from mud bricks, with no electricity or running water and currently cook inside using an open three stone fire. This type of fire creates a lot of smoke, burns a lot of wood and smoke inhalation is a major health hazard.

The brick stoves use 70% less wood are more efficient and a chimney is fitted to extract the smoke out of the building. Using considerably less wood means the children spend less time collecting sticks and is far more environmentally friendly.

The first day we sourced the materials and transported them to the family house. This was hard work carrying the bricks, cement etc., about 300 metres from the pickup truck to the family house. All the family helped carrying the materials along a dirt track including the women and children.

The second day we laid the breeze block frame and laid a cement base. The third day we laid the bricks and on the forth day we completed the stove with the metal plate surrounded by red tiles.

The finished stove looked good.

The family were very pleased with the stove but will have to wait three weeks for it to dry out completely before using it.

The family gave us sugar beet shoots as a thank you.

Building the stove in Honduras has made a tremendous difference to that family.

There are plenty more families in need of similar stoves but just lack the funding.

It was not all work the final day I visited the Copan ruins of the ancient Maya civilisation which was fascinating.

Why not be like me become a volunteer and make a real difference.