Romancing the stove (page 2)
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ON CHRISTMAS EVE DAY, we split into two groups and slog through rutted lanes of dried mud
into the mountains. Austin Woods and I are teamed with Héctor González, a local farmer
who has built 30 stoves in these hills. Woozy from altitude sickness, I whine like a child. “Only
10 minutes more,” González quips cheerfully in broken English every time I plead
with him to stop and let me rest. The next day, he brings me a horse.
When we reach the home of Carrol Bunga and Delida Perres, the painful trek is forgotten.
The small compound is forested on two sides, with several buildings to house the couple’s
five adult children and their growing families. The soot-stained kitchen is falling down,
but the family still uses it. The new stove is destined for a new kitchen, though the building
is, as yet, just four posts and a roof.
GET COOKING
Potatoes, large-nibbed corn and the aforementioned guinea pigs are plentiful in
northern Peru, and so is human capital. With lots of available labour, there is no real need
to import white-collar workers for simple construction jobs. But the project is about developing
a thriving tourism industry in the north — to rival the beaches of Lima, the history of
Cusco and the jungle rhythms of Iquitos — as much as it is about building stoves.
With that in mind, Toronto-based G.A.P. Adventures is among several sustainable
tourism outfits offering eight-day stovebuilding expeditions to Cadmalca. G.A.P.’s
Project Peru tour) covers mid-level, shared accommodations, meals and transportation within
Peru. (An additional fee is earmarked as a donation to the community.) Aside from
covering the cost of room and board, tourist dollars go toward local construction materials
and help employ a network of Spanishspeaking guides who take care that you don’t
get lost, sick or mugged.
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González and Bunga, a carpenter by trade, hang a plumb bob inside the open-walled
structure and hold intense discussions in Spanish as I work with the couple’s four-year-old
granddaughter Mireli. We carry bricks to the back of the house from the front, where they
had been transported by horse, and soak them in water. (I try not to notice how much better
she is at the task.)
Under the roof of the kitchen-to-be, we make a rectangle in the dirt, roughly a metre long
and two-thirds as wide, line it with the waterlogged bricks, then trowel on a mixture of
cement and sand. When we have built an enclosure three bricks tall, the teenaged Bunga boys
head into the hills with a wheelbarrow and return with mounds of limestone rock, which Woods
and I crush with a mallet into golf-ball-sized pieces to fill the centre of our brick box
and hold the stove’s heat. Finally, we add another layer of bricks, creating a shelf
for a cast-iron stove plate, and add a layer of cement around the plate, leaving a hole for
the stovepipe.
The finished project looks a little lopsided and has nothing on the walls of Machu Picchu,
but Perres seems pleased. She has a tear in her eye and pulls me in for a bear hug. Over
lunch of greenish eggs from grass-fed chickens, heavily salted potatoes and weak tea, she
hands me a cloth sack. Two scared guinea pigs toss uncomfortably inside. A Peruvian delicacy
known as cuy, the wriggling rodents probably realize they will be our dinner, pan-fried with
butter — perhaps even the very first test of our stove.
Patricia D’Souza is a senior editor with Canadian Geographic.
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