Stoves

I have spent two days this week visiting shambas (small farms) and seeing inside of women's kitchens. This, I'm sure, will continue for the next 7-8 weeks, until I am finished my research. My research is basically asking the question "what factors influence someone to use a fuel-efficient stove?". The most popular fuel saving stove here is the Chepkube- made of bricks surrounded by mud, and fashioned completely different for each woman. I was most surprised by the diversity of stoves.

Here is Violet, a pioneer in her area in terms of Chepkube use. She built hers three years ago. Her community has almost no Kalenjins in it (the tribe normally associated with this stove), but the stove is growing in popularity partly dut to her anyways. She arranged for me to meet three other friends who were in the same 'group' as her (people around here are arranged into formal or informal groups, where they share information about health, farming, and life in general. Often they have a purpose like chicken raising, but they discuss other things, ie HIV/AIDS too) who also have made their own Chepkubes.

A basic feature of a chepkube stove is an oven, which is not found on other fuel saving stoves that I have seen. They say that you can cook food in the morning and retrieve it, still warm later that evening. Violet's stove also has a brooder compartment underneath where chicks are kept.

Violet is an inspiration in other ways as well. She has a 0.1 acre plot, and amazingly, has managed it so successfully that she has been able to build a permanent house (i.e. made of bricks, not mud and sticks) and buy another 0.5 acre property elsewhere. Part of her success is due to having six dairy goats (goat milk is especially good and in high demand for people with HIV/AIDS... also as an alternative to breast milk, I think(?) for babies of HIV positive mothers). She also grows her own fuel wood, has many fruits, vegetables, a cow, and lots of chickens. The stove helps in her chicken-rearing enterprise as well.
This is Dorothy. She is holding the piece of kuni (firewood) that her stove consumes in a week to feed her large family. Together with that one piece of wood, she uses sawdust purchased at 45 cents for a month's supply. The wood is from a couple small trees she cut in November, and she expects that she won't need to cut any more trees until the following November. I don't know, but the sawdust innovation may be hers alone. I've not heard of it elsewhere, though the idea is beginning to spread throughout her community.

Different women customise their stoves in different ways. This one had different colours of clay used. Even though it is dark inside (the holes in the wall above the stove are for light), the stove was still very pretty.

Other women molded designs into their stove/ovens. The woman who owns this one is Kalenjin, so has been using the improved stove since she got married 30 years ago. Although she kept chickens, up to 100 chicks at a go, she did not build the brooder option into her stove. For her, she finds moving the cardboard box full of chicks closer to the stove in the nighttime suffices to keep them warm.

Here is a pic of two chicken 'coop' things- one for each size of chick, as well as a box for the smallest chicks. While I was there she lifted the baskets to let the chicks escape to scrounge for food in the yard. I was amazed they could find their way back again to the right basket!