My First Cocina Mejorada

Many of you may be asking yourselves, what is a cocina mejorada? Allow me to explain. A cocina mejorada is something us WASH 20ers know all about, were trained to construct and can give you a well-rehearsed lecture on its benefits as well as a basic tutorial on how to use it. It is an improved cookstove, improved meaning it's better than putting a pot on a couple stacks of bricks and cooking over an open fire which is a pretty common way to cook out here. Cocina mejoradas are enclosed cookstoves with chimneys to allow smoke to exit your home and away from your lungs. They use less wood than open fires and, when constructed properly, are quicker and more efficient. We built a couple throughout pre-service training and you can find all that here in a previous post.

When I first arrived, my site mate, Amanda, was working in a small secondary school in one of Guadalupe's annexes, Casa Blanca, and the director of the school was interested in a cocina mejorada to prepare breakfast for the kids each day. Just like that a project had fallen right into my lap. Easy enough right? Nope. With community diagnostic research and writing, integrating in my community, in-service trainings and traveling, of course, it was hard to find the time to organize and plan it all. On top of that I needed to find a socio to work with me to find funding and materials.

Luckily, there was a guy in the municipality's Sanitation Department that worked with the previous volunteer and was interested in building cocina mejoradas; however, he didn't know anything about actually building them. I got him in touch with a guy who makes the chimneys for many of the PCVs in La Libertad and in April we went to a cocina mejorada training in Otuzco with a bunch of other volunteers and their socios. Amanda spoke with the parents at the school and the offered to donate adobes, dirt (for mud making), sand and gravel (for concrete mixing) and the municipality provided the chimney, cement and rebar. I ended up buying the bricks myself and a suuuper nice man bought the school a new pot to use with the cocina (the pots need to stay in the "burners" of the stovetop when the cocina is in use to keep the heat from escaping so it's crucial that the pots used to make the stovetop are good ones that will last and that the user actually likes using them).

Amanda's final project also happened to be in Casa Blanca. She worked with an organization called Courts 4 Kids and they were sending down a group of college athletes from the University of Oregon to build a basketball court for the school in mid-June. We wanted to get the cocina built before construction of the court began so that the moms who volunteered to cook for the group could use the cocina to help prepare all the meals. So by the time June rolled around we were ready to go.

With everyone running around preparing for the arrival of the students, my socio wasn't actually available to help build the cocina. Fortunately, I found help in other places. Just before we began building the cocina, Amanda and I became friends with a woman named Lupe who was also interested in a cocina for her farm. She's the treasurer on a committee for one of Amanda's other projects, a juice shop run by a group of special needs students she'd been working with for her entire 2 years of service. Lupe and her son, Cesar, came out to the school to see what the cocina would be like and were crazy helpful whether it was bringing materials to the school, constructing the cocina, cleaning up the site and even bringing us lunch on those long tiring days. Amanda, Lupe and Cesar were there every step of the way and, cheesy enough, it was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Amanda helping Pablo mix cement for the stove top

Leaving the pots in the frame while the cement dries ensures that the burners will fit the pots without any spaces for heat to escape. So it's super important that the pots used to make the stove top are the pots the user will continually use. Custom-made!

We love cocinas!

After 6 months of being in site and 2 long weeks of coordinating and construction, the cocina was done and ready to be fired up just in time for the group of volunteers to arrive. My parents and younger sister were coming in on the same day and actually ended up being on the same flight as the Oregon kids. On their first day in Guadalupe, I brought my fam out to Casa Blanca to check out the cocina and not only did they help me light it for the first time, they even helped me fix up some last minute details to keep the cocina as efficient as possible! It was awesome to have the fam in my site, helping me with my first major project and seeing the cocina in action for the first time.

Perez Family cookstoves