To Be Continued...

Acclimating yourself to a new country is hard work. Luckily, Andrea´s family is extremely nice and understanding and accomodating, which is good ´cause I couldn´t possibly make it without them. Tomorrow, though, I´m taking a big step in getting used to Bolivia and paying the taxi fare to get us to and from work.

Speaking of work, I finally got some today. This morning Dave walked into the room where I was working on the computer, about to set up this blog and read my emails, and said:

"Why aren´t you doing anything?"

Now, generally the pace of life here should be pretty easy. Dave even told me that at the bus station when he picked me up. Now I was astonished. I told him that no one had given me anything to do yet.

"You can´t just sit around here waiting for something to happen to you. Take some initiative." Then he told me to help Severine, another intern, on translating some word documents for the CEDESOL web site.

Dave´s right, of course, though for a second I though he was mad at me. I have to take some initiative myself. It´s just kind of hard when you barely know the language.

Speaking of languages, Severine is from France and speaks pretty good Spanish and English in addition to her native French. What´s really weird, though, is when you realize that your native language is different than someone else´s, but you both have a third language you both know and you can actually understand each other in that. Holy moly, it´s strange.

I got to revising several pages she had written in some pretty good English, changing idiom when it was appropriate. They were about rocket stoves and solar cookers and why people should use them. I´ll recount the content for you a little bit:

A lot of people in Bolivia, especially in rural areas, cook with wood. If wood is burned incompletely, a lot of carcinogenic and toxic materials are released in the smoke. Outdoors, this isn´t a problem, but in an enclosed kitchen, two or three times a day, every day, this adds up to a serious health hazard, especially for women and children who hang around cookstoves the most. Additionally, wood combustion releases that famous greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the air. Meanwhile, generation upon generation of Bolivians cutting firewood, or leña, has led to widespread deforestation, which leads to erosion, soil depletion, and all kinds of things which throw the natural ecosystem out of kilter.

CEDESOL deals in developing and disseminating ecological cookers, technologies that have been developed since the ´70s to alleviate these kinds of problems. There are three main types: rocket stoves, solar cookers, and retained-heat cookers (colloquially known as "hayboxes.")

Rocket stoves work by improving the efficiency of wood combustion. They do this by making the fire as hot as possible, which means that it is largely smokeless: smoke is a byproduct of incomplete combustion, and therefore represents not only air pollution but inefficiency, chemical energy in the wood that hasn´t been converted into heat. Therefore, we want to make the fire as hot as possible. In a rocket stove, this is usually accomplished by an interesting trick of stove geometry. The stove is usually cylindrical and L-shaped, with the wood sticking into the horizontal branch and the combustion chamber in the elbow. The vertical branch is actually a chimney into which a pot is placed, with a small gap around the edge. When the fire really gets going, the heat and the chimney creates a draft which sucks air beneath the fuel wood in the bottom of the stove, which usually sits on a shelf with an air passage underneath. In this way the air gets preheated, which is important because then it won´t enter the fire cold and cool that down. The flue gases, largely without smoke, fly up the chimney at high velocity and scrape through the narrow gap between the pot and the chimney, punching through the boundary layer of still air which inhibits convective heat transfer to the pot.

There are finer points to the design, of course, but that´s the ¨rocket principle¨ that drives the whole thing. One of those finer points, however, was the materials testing for the ceramic combustion chambers which can both insulate the fire enough to keep it hot and still withstand the high temperatures without breaking. A good bit of that research was accomplished, if I´m not mistaken, at UD.

I´ve been writing for long enough, although that´s a brief explanation of one of the technologies CEDESOL works with and why it´s used. I´ve got to find something else to do tomorrow - probably having something to do with the website again.

A dios ustedes bendiga,

Dres