There is nothing more inspiring than meeting the people whom you are directly impacting with your work. On my first day in Guatemala, during our long drive from Guatemala City to the town of Barillas, we stopped in the town of Sumpango. Our destination was a stove store, where the Hands For Peacemaking Foundation stoves are sold alongside plancha stoves from other manufacturers.
My host, Marco Tulio Maldonado, the field director of our local partner Hands for Peacemaking Foundation (HFPF) explained to the two women running the store, Zoila and Casimira, that I was an engineer from the United States helping to improve cooking technology and make it more accessible. We spent most of an hour examining the stoves in the store and asking questions.
As we were saying our goodbyes, Zoila made a comment to me that Marco translated. “I am so happy you have come here to help us,” she said, “but I wish you could have come here sooner as my mother died from complications due to breathing in smoke over her cooking fire.” I thought about those words a lot during my time in Guatemala. We are not developing a stove that is a luxury item, we are developing a tool that has the ability to change people’s lives in the short term, and the land and environment around them in the long term. I’d been in Guatemala for only a few hours, but even in that short time my entire perspective on the importance of giving people a better cooking option was changed.
Since I returned from my ten days in Guatemala, the focus of the plancha project has shifted slightly. After building two prototypes that incorporated an ambitious new feature—making the stove self-feeding—we have decided to set a different goal. Now our plan is to improve the current stove that HFPF is producing without fundamentally changing how it is operated. The completion of this Phase 1 should result in a stove that is cheaper, lighter, safer and much more durable that the stove that is currently being sold by HFPF, and can be completed much sooner than a total redesign. Phase 2 will revisit the challenge of developing a new plancha-style stove that incorporates earlier research as well as new insights from the University of Washington engineering research group.
— Joe Gilmour