Clean Air For Guatemala

Some of you may know my wife Walki and I participate in a yearly volunteer project in Guatemala building simple cook stoves for people in abject poverty. This year the dates are set for March 2025, a date fast approaching!

It's traditional for the people who live in these conditions to cook over open fires in their houses. This fills their homes with smoke and incredibly high levels of carbon monoxide and other harmful air pollutants. When you walk into one of these homes while people are cooking you almost can't see. The smoke is thick and acrid, every room is filled and each smoke-filled room is also accompanied by a handful of children.

The Pulitzer Center has done the math and compares being in a room with an open cook stove to 400 cigarettes per hour smoked in the same room as you. Added to that is cultural pressure and lack of all modern kitchen aids, meaning a woman and her children can easily spend 9 hours a day inundated with smoke. It is estimated that 70% of Guatemalan women cook over open fires, leading to 2,500 premature deaths due to related diseases every year.

The result is Guatemala has one of the highest levels of lung disease, child and adult asthma, and vision problems in the world. This problem is not unique to Guatemala as over 1/3 of the world's population, over 3 billion people, cook over open fires.

The problem is global however Guatemala is particularly special to me because this is where my wife is from, she grew up helping her Mom cooking over an open fire. My wife's mother has extreme asthma and her mother died from lung issues certainly connected to cooking her entire life over an open fire, that's saying nothing about extended family. This is the story in the vast majority of homes across Guatemala and indeed a large part of the world.

The story doesn't just end with health problems, open fires are incredibly inefficient to begin with and waste the majority of the fuel used, deforestation is a major concern but relatively minor when compared with countless hours each day family members must go search for wood. This typically falls on children at the age they should be going to school and an education is always secondary to cooking. A clean burning highly efficient cook stove can reduce wood use by over 75%, freeing up massive amounts of time and money to be used for better purposes, along with saving what's left of the forests in Guatemala.

The solution that numerous nonprofit organizations are working towards is replacing the open or unvented cook stoves with simple, well-designed, durable, efficient and vented cook stoves. Organizations actively trying to achieve this goal including ONIL, Stoveteam, GACC, Estufas Mejor, Light Up Guatemala, and the organization I participate with "Masons on a Mission". Masons on a Mission is a non-religious non-profit group founded by a Master Mason from Maine with a big heart. Over the last 25 years Pat Manly has overseen well over 5,000 cook stoves built in and around the Lake Atitán area. The impact of his work can't be overstated. I've always felt privileged to be a part of this group and have the opportunity to enter peoples' homes in Guatemala and experience for a moment life as they see it. That feeling is much stronger now that I have in-laws across Guatemala living in similar situations.

The project itself is not free to participate in, each person must cover the cost of multiple cookstoves, pay for transportation along with their own food and lodging. I'm looking for donations to cover those costs for anyone out there who is interested in being a part of this project. By donating you will receive updates on the project as it happens and photos of the 5 stoves we will build along with the families they will serve.

For those who can't donate a word of support or sharing this post goes just as far! To those who can donate and those who have in the past Walki and I thank you from the bottom of our heart

Muchos Gracias!

Alex and Walki