Cooking with Gas! I Mean, MILLET!

Old cooking method and new cooking method, side by side

One of my favorite weekly activities in the village is going out to the "forest" with my mom to collect wood for the cooking fire. It gives me an opportunity to get away from the utter lack of privacy associated with communal living and spend some quality time with my mom. We get up early, strap on our machetes, fill our water bottles at the well and make the 2k hike out to the nearest stand of thorny trees to try and scavenge some wood. Sometimes we spend the morning shaving thorns off of discarded branches left behind by the local charcoal makers...other times we spend half an hour chopping down a tree and processing it into smaller pieces with just our dull machetes. In the early afternoon we tie up our bundles of wood with scraps of fabric and hoist them up onto our heads for the walk home. For me, this operation is still a novelty. A chance to get in some good physical activity and meditate on the irony of being an "environmental" volunteer who has certainly cut down more trees than she's planted. For my mom, though, spending upwards of 6 hours a week just trying to provide fuel for the cook fire isn't a game...its a life sentence to hard labor.

Packing the stove with millet chaff

As I was preparing to leave Sambande, I just couldn't stop thinking about my poor mom having to make that trip out there every week by herself. So when I visited my neighbor Jessica in her town and found out that her sisters cook lunch every day with just one stick thanks to a locally produced stove, I jumped at the chance to get one for my mom. Reducing the amount of fuel needed to cook lunch from 5 sticks to just one will dramatically cut down the number of times she needs to make that death march out to the forest...not to mention its better for the environment! The way it works is you pack the stove full of millet chaff or peanut shells, both of which are readily available waste products, leaving just a small hole in the center for the fire to burn. This insulates the fire, resulting in less loss of heat while also providing a secondary slow-burning source of fuel. What could be a more perfect parting gift for the woman whose adopted me as her own and taken such good care of me over the last two years than something that will make her life easier?

Hot hot hot!