We just got back from Antigua, City of Adventure. Or, as we often call it, “Gringolandia” because of all the tourists. As usual, Antigua was sunny, cool, breezy, cosmopolitan. The food is great, the beer cold, the showers hot. Here’s Emily smiling all day long. I’d like to say it was a vacation, but really we went to a lot of meetings to network with international development organizations.

We first met with the friendly people of StoveTeam International. Their specialty is the design, research, and proliferation of inexpensive and highly efficient stoves. In the few days we spent together, I got to really appreciate them for their kindness and earnest interest in making the world a better place. They took us on a tour of their factory, where they make a few different versions of a stove that uses 50% less wood, produces nearly no smoke, and is impossible for kids to fall into. It’s WAY better than the open fires a lot of Guatemalans cook over. We invited our boss Basilio to accompany us, and now he’s interested in looking into the technology further, even to the extent that he wants to bring all the volunteers back to the factory for our in-service training in a few months. Here’s pictures of the three stoves:

Their factory was a pleasant, open-air affair with a half-dozen workers, all appearing relatively content and well-treated. Of course, you still have the typical Guatemalan problems; for example, I saw a guy welding without using goggles. Apalling. I mentioned it to the foreman, and he said they guy just won’t wear them. That doesn’t cut it with me; that dude will be blind in just a few years, whether he realizes the impact of his actions or not. I brought this to the Stoveteam’s attention, and they seemed concerned but caught off-guard. Like many specialists, they missed it because they were pretty absorbed in the discussion about their area of interest: stoves.

Many of the Stoveteam people are also Rotarians. This is exciting for Emily’s dad (a Rotarian himself), but also for us: this international organization does a ton of aid work, and has a lot of power available for good, both in terms of “connections” as well as brute cash. For a few weeks we’ve been trying to hook up with Rotarians from both the Antigua area as well as Huehuetenango (a little closer to us). It’s tricky, with all the email communications and so forth. But StoveTeam had planned on meeting with the local Rotary guy Thursday, so Emily and I made the tough decision to extend our trip a day to meet him in person, wrecking our budget in the process. However, when the hour of the meeting arrived, he called to say he had to skip it to be with his wife because she needed surgery. That day wasn’t as fruitful as we’d hoped it would be.

At the end of our trip, we were able to squeeze in a little time with Froilan, my host dad from training. We’ve sortof started this tradition of taking him to lunch when we’re in town. This is kindof easy, as he owns a tiny tailor shop just off of the main drag in Antigua and just closes the shop for a few hours when we show up. We had a great lunch, talking and laughing and smiling. He was SO kind and helpful to me during training, and it’s nice to have someone in Antigua that we know is a real friend. This time out, we went to Freida’s, a somewhat costly (for all of us, anyways) place that we’ve been talking about as a joke for months. He knows I am poor, and I know he’s poor, so I told him a white lie to make sure he didn’t pay: that my dad wanted to treat him, so I was going to charge it. My dad DID give me some money for christmas, so I took the cash from there. The exchange rate makes dollars go a LONG way in Guatemala.

So, the last thing we got out of our trip is Elke. She’s an intern with StoveTeam, and she researches stove perfomance on-site by interviewing families, making observations, and taking tests with specialized air sampling apparatus. We spent some time with her during our week in Antigua, and now we’re taking her hack to our site to see the “real Guatemala”. She’s pretty experienced with this sort of thing already; she speaks Spanish and has traveled in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. But her experience with indigenous families is less, so we’re going to introduce her to some of our neighbors. Then, once she’s starting to get used to that, we’re going to drop her into the Real Nitty Gritty: Quixabaj. I’ll let you know how that goes.