Anatomy of a Project (Vol. 5.1) - The Stove Design

This fifth volume in our epic journey chronicling the economical stove project is about the stove design itself, as well as a bit about the construction process and the logistics that go into it.  There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I’ve decided to split the content into sections like I did with volume 3, The Key Players.  Read valiantly on!

The design we’re using in the economical stove project is promoted by the Peace Corps, and it's called the “inkawasi stove” after the Incahuasi district of Peru where the first project using the design was implemented in 2004.

If you’ll pardon me for a moment, I’m going to nerd-out linguistically and explain that Incahuasi is the Spanish spelling of the Quechua word Inkawasi.  Quechua is the most widely spoken indigenous language in South America, and was the language of the Incas.  In Quechua, inkawasi literally means “Inca’s house,” so it seems fitting that the stoves are now appearing in people’s houses all over Central and South America.

I like that the inkawasi stove is identified with such a uniquely American name in the sense that the word originated in a pre-Colombian American society and can therefore still be associated with its American indigenous roots in an age like today where nearly all of Central and South America has been compelled to define and measure itself against European and North American standards…but I digress.  I guess that can be the topic of a different post.

Front view

Side view

Top view

Coming up, we’ll take a closer look at the parts of the inkawasi stove. I’ll be sure to point out along the way how this excellent design helps to alleviate the issues of smoke in the home and high firewood consumption, thereby significantly reducing the health, safety, economic, and environmental consequences that we looked at in volume four, The Problemática.

And don’t miss the next installment of volume five, Materials and Design Elements, because you’ll get to feast your eyes on some hand-drawn illustrations made by yours truly!

    • (Vol. 1) – Intro to Economical Stoves
    • (Vol. 2) – Community Development…The Goal
    • (Vol. 3.1) – The Key Players
           (Vol. 3.2) - The Designers/Facilitators
           (Vol. 3.3) - The Community
    • (Vol. 4) – The Problemática
    • (Vol. 5.1) – The Stove Design ***
           (Vol. 5.2) - Materials and Design Elements

           (Vol. 5.3) - The Stovetops

           (Vol. 5.4) - The Table

           (Vol. 5.5) - The Stove Itself

           (Vol. 5.6) - The Chimney

    • (Vol. 6) – Community Workshops
    • (Vol. 7) – The Budget and Funding
    • (Vol. 8) – Designing for Sustainability

Still Life

        You know what they say about what you should do when life gives you citrus fruits right? Well, life in Nicaland doesn't often give you lemons…but sometimes it does give you naranja agria.

        In this series of still lifes*, I'll show you just what to do if you happen to come upon unexpected citrus. I decided to sacarles el jugo and make some refreshing fresco de naranja, just like any respectable Nica might do after receiving a similar windfall.

Anatomy of a Project (Vol. 4) - The Problemática

The title for this volume of the Anatomy of a Project series is “The Problemática.”  It felt natural to use the Spanish word problemática because there is no single word in the English language (that I can think of) that describes the concept quite as well.  A problemática (used as a noun instead of an adjective) is the collection, series, or totality of interrelated problems and consequences that surround an issue.  What a great word!  So, let’s take a closer look at the problemática of traditional cooking methods in the communities.

The prevailing cooking method in the communities of Los Álvarez and El Llanito is over an open wood fire.  Some families use three large stones or bricks, balance their pots on top, and then simply light the fire underneath, but many families have built (or have received by donation) stove-like structures formed out of concrete.

I call these structures “stove-like” in order to differentiate them from real stoves that actually make burning wood more efficient instead of just looking nicer.  The fact is, the stove-like abominations that most families use are no more efficient than lighting a fire between a few rocks.

Traditional cooking methods...this is a classic "stove-like abomination"

Two Fundamental Issues

Here's a slide from a presentation I made for a community workshop

There are two fundamental issues with traditional cooking methods:

Firstly, these cooking fires produce un cachimbo (a slightly vulgar way to say “a lot”) of smoke that becomes trapped in the home.  Some stove-like structures do have chimneys, but they’re really only for show.  Instead of going up the chimney, the smoke rises right out of the burners and collects in the kitchen to be breathed by women and children, just as if there was no chimney.

Most kitchens have their walls and ceilings burned black with soot.  When we had families keep track of how much wood they were consuming in a week, we gave them a nice white sheet of paper with a table for them to fill in, and when we got them back they were stained a disgusting sickly yellow.

The soot is pretty gross

Secondly, cooking with traditional methods consumes an obscene amount of firewood.  We’ve calculated that an average family (about five people) consumes about fifteen pieces of wood per day.  That’s 105 in a week, 450 in a month, and 5,475 pieces of wood in a year.  Multiply that by the number of families in the community (134 in Los Álvarez for example), and we’re talking about an estimate of 733,650 pieces of firewood consumed in one year in one small community in the smallest municipality of one of the least populated provinces of Nicaragua.  Clearly there is an astronomical amount of firewood consumed as a result of traditional cooking methods.

A casual wood pile

So, the two fundamental issues with traditional cooking methods (smoke in the house and high firewood consumption) lead to consequences for the community in four general areas: Health, Safety, Economy, and Environment.

Health and Safety

Traditional cooking methods lead to both health and safety consequences in the communities.  The health consequences are a direct result of the issue of wood smoke in the home.  The high levels of wood smoke inhalation lead to respiratory problems (one of the leading reasons among women to seek medical attention in rural Nicaragua) including chronic obstruction of the lungs with tar and phlegm, tuberculosis, asthma, and lung cancer.  The wood smoke gets into the eyes as well and affects vision, leading to additional health consequences such as cataracts and blindness.  The smoke also has an effect on the skin, causing more rapid aging, wrinkles, and a leathery texture.  When all is said and done, the daily exposure to wood smoke in the home reduces the life expectancy of women in these rural communities by about twenty years.


Along with the consequences of the noxious smoke produced by traditional cooking methods, the open flame itself leads to a slew of safety hazards, especially for children.  Both the women doing the cooking and the children who play around the cooking fire are subject to burns and other cooking accidents.  There have also been many cases of house fires (especially in the dry season) resulting from the precarious nature of open-flame cooking fires.

Part of the doctor's presentation at a community workshop

Economy

The issue of high firewood consumption has a large impact on the economy of families and by extension the communities where they live.  Family members can either go out to search for and cut down their own firewood (which is an investment of time and energy, not mention often illegal), or they can buy it.  On average in Santa Lucía, one piece of firewood costs two córdobas.  A family who consumes an average of fifteen pieces of wood a day with traditional cooking methods spends about 10,950 córdobas in a year just for firewood.  That’s $472.  Considering that the average Nicaraguan makes $2,000 a year, $472 is a very significant amount just to buy wood for cooking…nearly a quarter of one person’s annual earnings.

This amount of firewood might last a couple days

Environment

Last but certainly not least, the issue of high firewood consumption in traditional cooking methods leads to a great many environmental consequences.  The most pervasive consequence of high firewood consumption is, obviously, the problem of deforestation.  Trees are being cut down in the hundreds and thousands so that rural families can cook their daily meals, not just in the communities of Los Álvarez and El Llanito, but in all of Nicaragua.

We’ve actually calculated (with the help of a local expert who works for the Ministry of Agroforestry) how many trees are being consumed for firewood in the communities each year.  Each piece of firewood is about thirty-three inches long and three inches wide, which means that the average piece of firewood has a volume of 297 cubic inches.  Assuming one family consumes fifteen pieces of firewood a day, that same family consumes about 1,626,075 cubic inches of firewood every year.  This translates to 26.65 cubic meters of wood per year.

Average firewood size

If an average small tree has 3.5 cubic meters of volume, then the average family consumes about seven and a half trees each year in firewood.  We can then estimate that the community of Los Álvarez (134 families) consumes 1,005 trees each year, and the community of El Llanito (380 families) consumes 2,850 trees each year.  Assuming that one acre of forested land in Nicaragua holds about 96 trees, we can say that just between Los Álvarez and El Llanito, deforestation as a direct result of firewood consumption is advancing at a rate of forty acres per year.

Here's another piece of wood

And how does deforestation affect the environment you ask?  Well the ecological effects of deforestation are quite far-reaching.  For one, trees function as the earth’s air filtration system.  Through the processes of respiration and photosynthesis, trees process the CO2 in the air and produce oxygen, which we breathe.  As trees disappear, the oxygen levels and the general quality of the air goes down.

Trees also serve an important function with regard to the earth’s soil.  Tree roots hold soil in place and prevent erosion.  Erosion and landslides are a huge problem in Santa Lucía since the town is surrounded by cliffs. Most communities, Los Álvarez and El Llanito included, are located on the sides of the hills leading up to those cliffs.  Trees also provide important substances to the soil that keep it healthy and fertile.  With less trees, the amount of landslides goes up and the fertility of the soil goes down.

Another important function of trees is in their relationship with water, plants and animals.  Trees make up an important part of the riparian zones of streams and rivers, meaning that their roots prevent stream banks from falling into the water and polluting it, and their leaves provide the necessary shade that keeps water temperatures at the correct level.  The process of transpiration also has a huge effect on rainfall levels, which in turn affects the growing and harvesting cycles of crops.  Trees also provide important habitats for animals and plant species.  So as trees are cut down, we see water pollution go up, rainfall become erratic, and plant and animal species leave or die.

Let's conserve trees! Let's consume less wood!

These four areas of consequence: Health, Safety, Economy, and Environment come as a direct result of the issues of smoke and firewood consumption that surround traditional cooking methods.  The consequences are the problems that exist within the community, and they are the things that we want to change and improve upon in the economical stove project.  As we will see in volume five, The Stove Design, the economical stove provides a solution to each one of these problems in the four areas of consequence.

Looking towards El Llanito from Los Álvarez

    • (Vol. 1) – Intro to Economical Stoves
    • (Vol. 2) – Community Development…The Goal
    • (Vol. 3.1) – The Key Players
           (Vol. 3.2) - The Designers/Facilitators
           (Vol. 3.3) - The Community
    • (Vol. 4) – The Problemática ***
    • (Vol. 5.1) – The Stove Design
           (Vol. 5.2) - Materials and Design Elements

           (Vol. 5.3) - The Stovetops

           (Vol. 5.4) - The Table

           (Vol. 5.5) - The Stove Itself

           (Vol. 5.6) - The Chimney

    • (Vol. 6) – Community Workshops
    • (Vol. 7) – The Budget and Funding
    • (Vol. 8) – Designing for Sustainability


Next up, The Stove Design.  I'm going to release a neat little video with that one!  Stay tuned.

Learning the Language, A Chrestomathy* (Pictorial Supplement)

It’s true, the series about what it’s like to learn another language has been on a bit of a hiatus.  No more!

In the four previous installments I’ve written about big ideas like words, thoughts, speaking and communication, and the meaning that I believe must exist fundamentally before those higher-order processes can take place.   In learning a new language, assimilation must be (at least on a macro level) a progression from the bottom up, from pure unformulated meaning to the adoption of new culturally contextualized words based on that meaning, to the speaking and communication of interpersonal conversation.

This post, while not a true volume five, nonetheless deserves a place in the Learning the Language, A Chrestomathy series.  It’s something I’m going to call a supplement.  It shall be "Pictorial Supplement," because as you can see, it is a picture—a photograph of a drawing to be exact—and supplemental to the series.  Perfect!

I admit that I did not make the picture specifically with this post in mind, but I did draw it while I was in the midst of writing volumes one through four.  So I suppose a lot of the same mental ingredients worked their way in there.  Many of the ideas covered in the previous posts could probably be pointed to in contemplating the drawing.

What does it say to you?

NOTE: This drawing has nothing to do with projectile vomiting.

* For those who have have forgotten:
Chrestomathy-a selection of passages from an author or authors, designed to help in learning a language.

Also, if you're too lazy to click through the post archive to find volumes one through four, you can jump right to them with the following links.  How convenient!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement ***

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 4)

Remember: this is a continuing series...if you haven't read volumes 1-3, I recommend doing that because
there is a developing argument and I refer to things I've said previously...enjoy!

So to be clear, I want to say that normalization is a process during which our feelings (or unarticulated meaning) become conditioned by sustained use of words to come to us already habituated to the form (that is, the specific meaning) of those words, and that this conditioning gives rise to thoughts (or articulated meaning yet unexpressed).

Normalization is what happens as babies acquire language for the first time, and similarly, as we learn a second language. For a baby, this process deals directly with raw feelings, in the normalization of feelings and words, and therefore is a deep and fundamental kind of learning that informs nascent modes of thinking itself.

The difference in learning a second language however, is that we are basing the acquisition of our new words (in this case the Spanish ones) on our understanding and competence with our old words (the English). Our feelings and words have already been normalized, our modes of thinking established, and now we are attempting to substitute our old words for new ones.

This kind of learning is not as deep and fundamental as with that of the baby—instead, this kind of learning seems to be lateral, almost shallow. Learning another language could be just swapping out old words for new ones without considering making amendments or adaptations to the underlying meaning. But I don’t think it necessarily has to be like that.

Here we begin to butt up against the role that culture has in this discussion of language and meaning. What I mean is, in order to truly understand a language, one has to be sensitive to the meaning and significance of words within their cultural context. For example,  I could know the literal Spanish translations of every English word in the dictionary, but I would still sound like a bumbling gringo idiot in a Spanish conversation without certain knowledge of cultural norms, speech patterns, phrases, idioms, inflection, and pacing.

So an important part of learning a second language is learning a second culture as well—in addition to the lateral movement of word substitution that exists on the surface, one must also take care to really understand the meaning and significance of new words within the second language. This contextual learning comes from an understanding of culture; that is, from an understanding of the attitudes and behavioral characteristics of a given social group.

~

I view my learning of Spanish in Nicaragua almost as the birth of my “Spanish-speaking self.” I have tried to think of my burgeoning language abilities as mirroring the same kind of development a Nicaraguan baby goes through as it picks up language for the first time. Sure, I base a lot of my learning on what I’ve learned as an English-speaker, to ignore all of that would be insane, but for many things, especially aspects of social life and custom, speech patterns and inflections, I try to forgo my American cultural inclinations and search for a new Nicaraguan base understanding.

In this way I’m striving to realize a process of normalization analogue to the deep normalization that establishes fundamental modes of thinking in babies. I don’t want to think that I’m replacing the modes of thinking I learned as a baby developing in America, but rather that I’m expanding those modes of thinking, giving them more dimension with the addition of new cultural and linguistic norms along with the new words themselves.

So, if in the future I happen to travel to another Spanish-speaking country or have the opportunity to converse with non-Nicaraguan Spanish speakers, I assume that it will be glaringly obvious to them that I learned Spanish in Nicaragua. I will have a Nicaraguan accent, speaking cadence, diction, etc because in effect, my Spanish-speaking self was born in Nicaragua. I am interested to see if it will be possible to adopt different Spanish accents in the future. Will speaking in an Argentine accent for example, always feel affected in the same way that speaking English with a British accent feels affected?

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4 ***
• Pictorial Supplement

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 3)

This is my vision—maybe my illusion; at any rate, this is how I imagine stuff works inside my head. There is an amorphous, amoeboid thing, a feeling, that emerges undulating out of some foggy corner of my brain, I know not from whence it comes; it is a notion, strangely-shaped with subtle topography—sometimes pockmarked, jagged, sometimes glossy and fluid—ridged, channeled, crevassed. Its hue is a sunset or a dawn, a tinge in variation, like an octopus changing its color. This feeling is complex—ineffably so.

Then the words come. They come like shipping containers; they come to package the feeling. Words are envelopes, packets, parcels, bags, boxes and crates—a whole diction of vessels of standardized sizes and shapes. With luck, there is a lexical package that closely matches the feeling’s multiplex form, fitting it as best it can. The better the word, the better it conforms to the feeling’s shape, thereby retaining and transmitting its essence.

 But in every case on some level, the process of packing feelings into words makes the feelings lose their subtlety, their complexity, their absolute authenticity. Feelings are infinities, and words, by virtue of being finite units, leave something out that existed originally. Words are necessary however, because despite the net loss of meaning, once feelings have been jammed into words, we can think.

~

I imagine that this idea, this cramming of feelings into words, eventually feeds back into itself and stabilizes, and I think the feedback loop that emerges can help explain how we learn language and develop the capacity to use it as a tool to think and communicate, thereby gaining efficacy in the world.

 After a long period of using certain words to describe certain feelings, we grow accustomed to them; that is, our feelings are affected by the containers (the words) we pack them in. They emerge in our brain not as impossibly fluctuating dynamic entities, but as quietly undulating things pre-molded into the shape of their packages, into the shape of the words themselves. In this sense, thoughts and words become one in the same. I’ll call this the process of normalization, and it’s the birthing rite of thoughts.

 After sustained use of words our feelings are no longer ineffable infinities, they become verbal and thinkable—they become thoughts. After normalization we mean what we say and we say what we mean.

I want to mention here before moving on that I think genuinely new ideas, creativity, poetry, inspiration, innovation, all come from this pre-verbal place. These things are born of feelings, of pure unarticulated meaning. Es decir the Muse resides in feelings but must be tamed by thoughts, that is, by words.

In the next post we'll try and figure out how the process of normalization plays into learning another language...what fun!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2
• Volume 3 ***
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 2)

Since I am still actively learning the Spanish language, there are a few different levels of proficiency with which I can communicate, completely depending on the context and the content of the conversation, that is, depending on the words and phrases I’m required to use in a given situation.

At a fundamental level, the most effective level of communication, the Spanish words materialize with more or less the same fecundity as they would in English. For example, I can greet someone, introduce myself, comment on the weather, say where I’m going, and say goodbye with a fairly high level of competency and with a fairly low level of thinking about translations. In fact, at this level, the Spanish words and my thoughts seem to fuse together like they do in English. Unfortunately, not all of my Spanish speaking experience can take place at this fundamental level.

The next level is a level of searching, that is, trying to think of words and expressions that I know in English and making guesses about how to phrase or pronounce them in Spanish. It’s about using a network of associations to communicate and really represents the essence of learning. I think of my English knowledge as a kind of springboard that I use to launch myself into the realm of Spanish. Maybe I pull off a perfect dive and maybe I belly flop painfully. Sometimes it feels kind of like grasping about in the dark for gems.

For this reason, the searching level can be both very satisfying and utterly disheartening. It just depends on the rate of success. For example, I was once trying to describe a fork in the road, so I chanced the phrase “un tenedor en el camino” and I got some very strange looks. But other times I’ll guess right and get super pumped. The expression “to kill two birds with one stone” seems to translate directly (matar dos pájaros con una sola piedra). Those are the times I love learning Spanish.

But it’s just as important to understand what others say as it is to be able to articulate your thoughts. The problem can be illustrated thusly: I’ll be chugging along happily thinking I’m the best Spanish speaker in the world, talking about things I’ve talked about before and therefore know how to talk about…and then the topic changes and someone throws in a string of brand new words. My dreams of linguistic prowess are crushed, suddenly and without mercy, and I have to bashfully explain that I have no idea what’s going on. Sometimes I’m saved by the fact that the person with whom I’m conversing can dumb down what they’re saying and rephrase it using words that I know, but that doesn’t always happen. It’s made very clear at this level of communication that when learning a language, listening and speaking are really two sides of the same coin.

And I suppose there is a third level of communication proficiency after the fundamental and the searching, which can be characterized by absolute incomprehension, and which I will (accordingly) call the level of incomprehensibility. I don’t often find myself operating at this level of (in)communication in Spanish, gracias a Dios, but every once in a while, if I stop paying attention to a conversation, I will become utterly lost, be unable to contribute anything, and start looking for a way to leave.

~

So I find myself describing a few separate things here. There is thinking and there is speaking and then there are words. Thinking seems to be made up of internal verbal strands and speaking seems to be made up of external verbal strands. The building blocks of both of these kinds of strands then, are words (hence verbal strands). I suppose it might make sense to talk about words specifically as those elements of oral communication—that is, the constituent parts of speaking—but I want to talk about thoughts, those unspoken but nonetheless articulated elements of language, as being made of words as well.

I will unpack then, exactly what I mean when talking about “words.”

I want to appropriate words as being vehicles for articulating meaning. That is they can articulate meaning taciturnly as with unspoken thought, and lingually, out loud as with speech, and of course written down as well, but this is not an important distinction for my purposes here. To put it bluntly, thoughts are unspoken words and speech is spoken words. But there is something I’m leaving out in this relation between words, thoughts, and speech, and that is unarticulated meaning. What I want to find is the source of thoughts and speech, and this means thoughts without words, preverbal thinking, pure unformulated meaning. And I want to call this source, this unarticulated meaning, a feeling. My intuition tells me that a feeling precedes a thought. (don't worry I'm not even going to try to adress how intuition fits into this.........)

Stay tuned for the next installment as I dive into the main metaphor of the argument!

• Volume 1
• Volume 2 ***
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement

Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 1)

*Chrestomathy-a selection of passages from an author or authors, designed to help in learning a language.

I have been immersed in the Spanish-speaking world for over a year now and it still fascinates me to no end to think about what must be going on inside my head as I learn things. Have synaptic pathways been re-routed? Have my “normal” modes of thinking been qualitatively changed by the process of assimilating a new language?

My intuition tells me that they have, and I certainly want the answer to be yes since that would indicate progress toward my general goal of “learning Spanish,” but there’s a creeping doubt that comes to me every time I think hard on the topic of language. Have I really been learning Spanish, or have I just learned a bunch of Spanish words that I translate back and forth from English? Is thinking in Spanish a necessary condition for gaining fluency? Are there aspects of language that can only be accessed by native speakers? How much of fluency is cultural? Can a monolingual person ever truly become bilingual? This frantic line of questioning seems to spiral down to oblivion, evading satisfactory answers…

But here’s the million-córdoba question as far as I can tell, the one that really gets at the heart of the problem:

Can meaning be separated—that is, does meaning stand alone—from the language that expresses it?

It seems to me that learning a second language can help parse apart the nature of language itself and shed light on the relationship between feelings and thoughts and the words that express them. In this series of posts I’m going to try and clarify that hazy relationship (commenting on the ontological status of meaning along the way) by drawing from my own experience in learning Spanish as a second language.

~

When I speak English, my native tongue, it seems to me that during day-to-day conversation, during those commonplace exchanges about the latest gossip, what I’m going to eat, or what I did yesterday, there is no perceived premeditation in word choice—I don’t have think about the words before I say them. The fluidity and ease with which I can express my basic needs and wants, my nuanced ideas and subtle impressions, is a striking aspect of the effortless way I can exist in my environment when speaking my mother tongue. I have a thought, usually accompanied by some sort of mental image, and the words are simply there as if they were the thought itself. Indeed, the majority of the time I speak English, and not just in day-to-day communication but in more involved conversation as well, my thoughts, words, and what I say seem to be one in the same. It must be said however, that the deftness with which I can employ the English language only becomes noticeable in comparison to the embarrassing ineptitude with which I speak Spanish.

In sharp contrast to the fluid relationship between my thoughts and words when I speak English, speaking Spanish is a constant struggle. I think this struggle can reveal, however, something important about the ontological status of meaning—that is, where and how meaning exists.

This is the first installment of a continuing series called Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy. No one knows how many posts there will be in the end, but I'm working on a fairly long essay on this subject, and the post you've just read is the introduction. I'll try to post a new volume every week until I'm finished writing...hopefully this self-imposed deadline will give me the motivation I need to finish it! Don't forget to comment!

• Volume 1 ***
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement