Mennonite
Central
Committee

Stoves and latrines in rural Mexico: MCC provides basic technology to make life better

Marla Pierson Lester
October 3, 2006

ZACONGO, Mexico- In this rural village in the state of Guerrero, Leovijilda de Jesus García expertly pats out tortillas, moving them onto a round, iron cooking surface, heated from below by burning wood.

The stove, which has a pipe that sucks smoke up and out of the house, is part of MCC's efforts to improve families' lives and health in this rural village in the Mexican state of Guerrero.

Farmers face a slate of challenges in this semi-arid region, which receives less than an inch of rainfall from November to May. In addition to struggling to earn enough income from agriculture, families sometimes travel long distances in the dry season to haul water to their homesteads.

In the villages around Olinalá, MCC provides technical assistance and molds for stoves, latrines and cisterns and explores ways farmers can make a better living from this parched soil.

MCC has helped to build more than 60 stoves, more than 140 latrines and more than 110 cisterns in the region.

Before she got the MCC stove, García said, each time she cooked or heated water smoke filled her home, blackening the walls and roof.

"We were enclosed in smoke. The strength of the smoke would make tears come," she remembers. "Until today, they still tell me my lungs are bad, and it has to do with the smoke."

The MCC design has a large, round iron cooking surface, two burners and a closed area for the fire.

"It's better now," García said. The smoke goes out of the house. She no longer has to watch out for flames that would sometimes rise from underneath the fire and burn her arms. While she had only a single cooking surface before, she can now boil water on the large cooking surface or in either of two burners as she heats tortillas.

And this stove uses less wood a critical consideration both for impoverished families and for MCC's agriculture work in the region. In this mountainous, mostly dry region, trees are an extremely valuable resource to help preserve soil, which washes down hilly slopes when rains do come.

MCC provides communities with technical assistance and molds for stoves and latrines. Communities provide materials and labor.

García's dry latrine replaced a simple toilet seat over a hole that she poured water into after each use of the toilet.

"Some people didn't want to make it. I did. Look at the situation of water. Because I have a dry latrine, I don't have to use water," García said.

García said some residents tell her they don't want a dry latrine because it will smell bad. "I tell them no, it doesn't," she said. She mixes ashes from wood with soil and adds a cupful each time the latrine is used.

The MCC design has space so that once one side of the latrine is full, the waste and ashes can be left to compost while the other side is used. The compost, after a period of about a year, is completely dry and ready to be used on crops.

The first time García emptied the compost, "I didn't even want to take it out. But I used it. It was very dry," she said. And her crop thrived. "I see the corn comes up well if I put on the fertilizer."

In addition to stoves, latrines and cisterns, MCC promotes and researches techniques to help farmers sustain themselves on dry and often poor soil.

 

Marla Pierson Lester is a writer for MCC.