Kids, stoves, and more kids

My boss and I went out on Thursday to visit the community of San Francisco Jalapexco in the municipality of Teopantlan, pretty close to the volcano Popocatepetl (pictured).


Our visit was to check up (and georeference) a stove project for women in the community. Basically, the idea is to build more efficient wood-burning stoves to reduce the cutting of trees and have chimneys that direct the smoke out of the house to create a healthier living environment. In my experience, most of the children in the communities are pretty shy and quite, this town was the exception. The second we got out of the car I was bombarded by children wanted to play with my camera, the gps unit, my sunglasses, and anything else I had on me. The kids were fascinated with the camera so we took a lot of pictures so they could see themselves on it. Here’s some of those photos.

As we made our way to different homes to see the various stoves, we picked up a couple more kids and soon had English lessons going on. One girl wanted to know how many friends I had in the US and then asked me to name them all. She then started asking me if I knew Sandi, Ramon, Martin….. and I was honestly so confused who she was talking about. I finally realized that she was listing all the people from her town that had gone to work in the US. Most of them are in New Jersey, Puebla’s main migration destination.

Many of the homes in this region of the state are made of palm. The sizes and structure of these houses vary from town to town and here, they were actually pretty tall. I've been in some where I can't fully stand up inside. The doors were still pretty tiny though.

Inside

Additional storage

Homemade mezcal break

The Poinsettias (called noche buenas in Spanish) in Mexico can grow to the size of trees

Charcoalmaking in process

Everything was going smoothly until we got to the last house. I was 3rd in line as we walked into the last house when one of their dogs decided to get a good hold of the back of my thigh. Luckily he didn't break through my jeans, so no need for a shot, but he got a decent bite in that drew enough blood and has left me with a nasty bruise and a slightly gimpy leg.

Indigenous Village projects in Cuetzalan

Early Tuesday morning, I went with my boss to Cuetzalan, a town in the Sierra Norte, to check on the progress of 2 projects that built more efficient wood burning stoves for indigenous women. It was quite a contrast to go up there after having just been in one of Mexico’s most modern cities the day before. After trekking up some almost-impassable roads, we finally arrived at the 1^st community. We walked between homes visiting the various stoves and kinda chatting with the women. Most did not speak Spanish, but the technician that helped build the stoves was able to translate between Nahuatl and Spanish for us. None of the houses have running water or drainage, but some have recently gotten electricity.

The town center of Cuetzalan (you’ll be seeing a lot more of these in about a week since I will be returning for Coffee Fair on the 4^th of October)

Estufa Lorena (a more efficient wood burning stove that always funnels all the smoke out of the house, so it’s healthier and more environmentally friendly)

Chicken in a fruit crate, what you can’t see in this picture is that the box is actually hanging in the middle of the room….it used to be used as a baby’s cradle

In addition to my boss and I, another guy who works free-lance with green technology and community development, had tagged along and wanted to show us the proposed spot for some cabins. The road down to the river was awful, but luckily the jeep didn’t have too many problems. Once we got to the bottom of the canyon, we walked down to the river, where the community would like to put the cabins. It was a nice site, but with the combination of fairly impassable road and nothing really going on other than a pretty river, I don’t think they would really get the tourist traffic required to maintain the cabins.

Then we went to Xaltipan to see the 2^nd stove project. The town was also in the middle of harvesting white pepper. It’s like the black pepper that was a used to in the states, but has a slightly different flavor. Every house we went into had bags and bags of pepper corns (or wheel barrows full of the ground pepper). The smell was amazing, and at the end of the visit the community gave each one of us a huge bag of pepper corns to take home.