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
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 4th 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 2nd 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.
