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Monday, August 1, 2011

A good week for alternative energy

People, both Zambians and Americans, often ask me what I do in the village, and it's a difficult question to answer. Not just because what I do, primarily, is LIVE in the village, which means the list of things I "do" in the village is very long and prominently features such incredible accomplishments as sleeping, reading, and cooking on an open fire, but also because my program within Peace Corps, aptly named the LIFE program, is multi-faceted and immensely broad. LIFE is an acronym for Linking Income, Food, and Environment, which is an umbrella that covers all topics from income generation to environmental education, from food security to reforestation, from organic farming to nutrition education, from beekeeping to tree nurseries to energy efficiency to animal husbandry and so on.
On top of this, the Peace Corps Volunteer experience itself is very broad and open-ended. Volunteers essentially write their own programs, tailor-made to suit the needs and interests of the village and the interests and abilities of the volunteer. So it is easy for a LIFE volunteer to branch out from the already-broad guidelines of their program and work in programs like fish farming, sanitation and health education, youth development, womens' empowerment, schoolteaching, etc. And, of course, when you work in Africa, just about every development program, directly or indirectly, relates back to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS.
But at its heart the LIFE program is about improved forestry practices. Zambia currently boasts one of the highest deforestation rates of all the countries in the world. The LIFE program was originally begun in conjunction with and to support Zambia's forestry department in reforestation and environmental preservation. We build fruit tree nurseries and woodlots for food and timber, teach farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing trees in their fields (agroforestry), discourage the slash-and-burn technique called chitimene and encourage "early burning" (burning in May-June before the tree seeds begin to germinate), teach in schools about the importance of forests and ecosystems, teach farmers to keep bees so they will have a vested interest in flowering trees to increase honey production, and explore alternative fuel sources to reduce the rate of deforestation caused by firewood-harvesting and charcoal-burning.
Encouraging forest conservation through the promotion of alternative fuel sources is a topic I find greatly interesting because it relates to the field of "appropriate technology"-- the idea that people at the local level should be able to use local materials and their own skills and creativity to find inventive ways to improve their own lives, rather than sitting around waiting for aid agencies to come drop expensive machines and solutions in their laps. Of course appropriate technology is not applicable to every circumstance-- certainly there are situations where people are sick or hungry and simply need to be helped as quickly as possible-- but they are also a plethora of situations where the best way to help a group of people is to empower them to take control of their own lives and solve problems themselves. This concept has led to the invention of products such as locally-built handwashing stations, maize shellers, honey presses, and ways to preserve food through drying, smoking, and refrigeration. It has also led to the invention of two popular methods of using fuel without chopping down trees: corn cob charcoal and the fuel-efficient stove. These two inventions tie into my program-- the reforestation and environmental sustainability part-- perfectly, and they're a lot of fun.
A fuel-efficient stove runs on the idea that a cooking fire in a tightly-enclosed, insulated space (as opposed to an open fire) creates a concentrated supply of heat, allowing a person to cook using only deadwood found around the yard. This not only saves trees but also significantly reduces time and labor spent searching for firewood-- an especially large problem for women and young ladies who should be in school. The stove is built from a brick-clay-mud-sand-ash-straw mixture (the proportions and ingredients vary based on what's available), leaving a hollow area inside for the fire and a hole in the top and one side for wind flow. After it's built you must wait 2 weeks for the mud to dry before you can use it for cooking; the fire and heat exits the top hole and heats the pot that you place over said hole.
I built my first stove-- my own-- one year ago, about 3 months after I was posted at site. I built it on a platform so that I could stand while cooking, and I was really happy with the way it turned out. I built two more stoves with two different women in October, and then in January I built a stove with a women's group. Then this past Saturday I built a large two-burner stove on a raised platform with two young teachers in my age group. It was wonderful to work with someone who showed genuine interest in the work I was doing. They were very excited by the idea of having a stove to cook on. The building process took the entire day-- the platform took most of the morning, but the stove itself only took a little over an hour to make. Carrying soil and water and mixing the mortar took a large portion of our time and energy. We had to carry water in large buckets from a river nearby, carry bricks one by one, shovel sand into bags and carry it to the building site on my bicycle, and then use shovels and hoes to mix the ingredients as thoroughly as possible, or until our arms began to hurt from the weight of the water-logged soil, whatever came first. By the time we finished we were exhausted and sweating under the weight of mud and dust, and I had dirt all over my clothes, face, and arms, but it was the type of exhaustion that comes from a long day's work, so it didn't bother me. I took pictures and exchanged hugs and smiled all the way home. It was a good day.
As a general rule it is wise to only initiate programs in your village if there is interest amongst your villagers; otherwise you are likely to be working alone. However, when I first read about corn cob charcoal in a training manual I was so enamored by the idea that I ran to one of my counterparts, Mr. Chola, and began talking so excitedly about the topic that he was inspired by my enthusiasm to try and make some with me, though he no doubt thought his volunteer had gone insane. It was very nice of him to humor me.
Corn cob charcoal is usually made by cutting a hole in an oil drum, filling the drum with corn cobs, lighting a fire underneath the drum, and then, once the cobs are lit, sealing the drum tightly closed with soil to start the carbonization process. My counterpart, however, was only willing to indulge my insanity to a certain point; while he's not an avid drinker himself, people in my village are very fond of the cultural practice of brewing beer and wine in oil drums, and cutting a hole in the very expensive drum to light a fire underneath struck him as ridiculous. So I agreed to try it his way, or the Zambian way: arrange the cobs in a large mound, surround the cobs with thick, fibrous soil and grass, light the cobs and burn them a little, then cover them with fibrous lumps of soil to make a large soil kiln that traps the oxygen inside and allows the cobs to carbonize. This is how charcoal from trees is made in Zambia, and Mr. Chola saw no reason why it wouldn't work with corn cobs as well. So we tried it, and I was shocked to find that it worked quite effectively: within 30 hours we had a large pile of cob-shaped charcoal.
All this took place one year ago, and then the maize-harvesting season ended and the supply of cobs fell, so we decided to wait until the next harvest season to start sharing the idea with others. Which leads us to this past Friday, when we called a workshop to show people our idea of an easy, cheap, environmentally friendly(er) source of fuel-- one that would not only save trees and money and labor but would also amend the soil (the carbonization process makes the soil fertile) and reduce the amount of harmful woodsmoke people are breathing, thereby improving the village's overall health. It sounded like a win-win situation, but unfortunately attendance at the workshop was frustratingly low-- of the dozen people in attendance, 7 were family members who already lived on the compound with me and were only present because I was holding the workshop in their front yard. Still, while this sort of low turnout is discouraging, it is also quite common. And as my mother keeps telling me, making a difference in just one person's life is more than enough.
So I took a deep breath and held the workshop anyway-- we built a mound of soil, lit it, and sealed it so the cobs would carbonize. Then we took charcoal cobs from another pile we had prepared the week before and began the second part of the charcoal-making process: turning the cobs into charcoal briquettes. This is done so the charcoal will last longer-- cobs on their own burn very fast. What you do is pound the charcoal into small pieces, then mix it with a glue made by soaking cassava flour in hot water and then straining it. This creates a sort of black paste, which you then pack into tin cans with the bottoms missing and pound down with a hammer. This creates strong, tightly compressed briquettes which, after they dry for a couple of days, will burn about as long as regular wood charcoal. Everyone at the workshop got the chance to make a briquette, and then we got to burn some dry ones (we boiled some water, which I used to wash up later).
So to sum up: you get to dig up a lot of earth and then light a pile of corn cobs on FIRE and then ATTACK the dirtkiln with hoes to get the charcoal out and then POUND the charcoal and get your hands all dirty mixing it and then HAMMER it into little briquettes for drying. Seriously, who wouldn't want to do this all day every day? My guests ultimately agreed that the entire process is a lot of fun. I'm tempted to say getting my hands covered in gross black stuff was the highlight of the experience for me. I personally can't fathom why I didn't have hundreds of people at my workshop; CLEARLY this is the coolest thing ever, right? They must not have fully understood the awesomeness of the process.
And that's my week of adventures in alternative energy sources. Who knew saving trees could be so much fun? When I biked to Serenje on Sunday I was 3 times dirtier than normal-- as I showered I found dust and bits in my hair (my hair is like velcro, so I wasn't surprised). But it's fun to get your hands (and chitenge) dirty-- that's why I'm here in Peace Corps, to spend time with nature, and if I can help nature in the process, well that's just a bonus.