Low Smoke - Low Wood Burning Cook Stoves are ap-tech

Another appropriate technology for developing countries is creating ways to cook food with the least amount of wood and smoke.  Women and children in developing countries spend 90 minutes a day gathering wood, and as communities experience deforestation, the time increases, as they have to go further and further from home to find wood.  Cooking over an open wood burning fire generates a lot of smoke and women and children who do this regularly experience lung disease - it is like smoking 4-5 packs of cigarettes a day.  In developing countries this is a huge threat to the health of children and their mothers.

SIFAT taught  our Family Mission trip children how to combat the above through ap-tech that creates adobe bricks, to be used to build low-smoke, low-wood burning rocket stoves -- and through ap-tech that uses wood chips (found in areas of deforestation) to generate fire instead of wood logs.

We made adobe bricks from the indigenous red clay and straw (hay), using an inexpensive and easy to build frame.  Once dry, these bricks can be used to build houses or rocket stoves.  We used the rocket stoe to cook in the Global Village - Uganda had one - and it was an efficient way to boil water, and did require just a small amount of fire wood (which was great because it was pouring and dry wood was hard to find!).

The children of the Family Mission trip also cooked our lunch using wood-chip cylinders.  This required just a small amount of wood to get burning - - in fact, we used pine needles and pine cones.  Once we got a flame going, the cylinder of wood chips caught fire and generated the heat to boil our water (which cooked our rice, beans and onion  - -and thank goodness, some salt!).

Addison told us that currently people from 87 countries scrape together enough funds to send a delegate from their community to SIFAT -- and this delegate spends 5-10 weeks at SIFAT, learning ap-tech, and then can bring it back to their home-land.  This is truly life-saving, life-changing technology for the delegates and their communities.