Somethings are hard to learn from a book. They’re more CAUGHT than TAUGHT

Allan with students completing a hand-made clay stove. Technology is only appropriate when solves more needs than it creates. While there has been great economic progress in recent decades, in many regions people still live on less than $2 a day. Often still cooking with wood on dangerous, smokey and inefficient 3-stone kitchen fires. People must buy or walk great distances for wood and the smoke is often the primary contributor of pneumonia and respiratory disease. A clay stove often uses 3X less wood, with the chimney smoke tunneled under a second hole you can cook two large food pots on the same fire (as well as keeping the tortillas or chapatis warm); the stove never gets hot preventing many accidental burns and the smoke exits the house through its own chimney eliminating nearly all the thick, choking indoor smoke. And usually at no cost? Just local community clay in their field and a little bit of work. But it’s not something you can lean and then teach from a book. You need to have gotten you hands dirty making one to understand how it works. These students were just about to leave for Nepal, where our local staff there had been asking for help making these low-cost, high-efficiency, smoke-free wood-burning stoves.

Somethings are hard to just learn from a book. They’re more CAUGHT than TAUGHT