Stove Project San Pedro: Instruction Day

Monday, January 21, 2008

Instruction Day

On early Thursday morning, we all gathered at a local home to hear information and receive instruction on how to properly construct and operate the Olin stoves. As you can see from the photos people were so excited, they were practically on top of the stove as it being built. For everyone to understand, the instruction process consisted of a hodge podge of 5 languages: 2 different Mayan dialects, Spanish and English, and a bit of German.
After the instruction, one by one a member of each household had to sign a contract basically saying, they will not sell or alter the stove in any way. I was amazed to learn many of the people signed the contract with only an X. Since the concept of writing is not in many of their worlds they have no signature. We learned that typically and ink pad and fingerprint is the norm. Next round I guess we buy an ink pad! This is a one big learning curve in so many ways!

1 comment:

Unknown said...: When I bought my house through costa rica homes for sale
I expected to have a big stove in the kitchen with a huge space, now I am really happy because I can cook every kind of recipe in my huge stove. I really love it.; July 21, 2010 at 2:02 PM

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A bit about the village,lake,people,culture and the area

At the southern edge of the broad highland belt that runs through Guatemala, captured in a mountain basin commanded by three towering volcanoes, lies Lake Atitlán. A score of Indian settlements, dwarfed by the mountain backdrop, lie scattered around the twisting shores of the 1ake which measures twelve miles long and half as wide. Like the million and a half Indians that make up half of Guatemala's present population, the residents of the Lake Atitlán basin speak dialects of the Maya-Quiche linguistic stock, akin to the language once spoken by the builders of the fabled Maya Empire of lowland Guatemala and Yucatan. The women weave on backstrap looms, the men cultivate corn on mountain slopes and valley plots, and the people of different villages exchange goods in open markets.
The villages surrounding the lake differ from one another in size, specialized crops, and level of wealth. Each has its characteristic costume, its peculiar dialect, and its distinctive customs, despite centuries of cross contact. Each community has repatterned its twin heritage of original Indian and introduced Spanish traditions into a way of life as distinctive from the others as are the personalities of different individuals. Every village may be said to have its own culture. Reliant on spoken rather than written tradition, yet increasingly subject to city ways, these peasant communities combine primitive and civilized features.
San Pedro la Laguna, has a cluster of some five hundred adobe houses compactly grouped in blocks around a central square. With a population of 2400, the village is third largest of the lake settlements and occupies a terrace more than a hundred feet above the water at the base of an inactive volcano whose steep sides form part of the agricultural hinterland. Situated about 5,000 feet above sea level, the village enjoys a temperate climate, the annual cycle consisting of a wet and dry season of about equal duration.
No roads connect San Pedro with other villages. The people travel on foot and occasionally on horseback along narrow paths winding around precipitous hillsides.