Here's the long awaited update! With pictures!
So as many of you all know, I have been left a fogon project by the previous volunteer in my site, Anne. Anne had the whole thing set up for me when I got here, all of the materials were bought and everything, the only thing I have to do is build fogones. So that is what I have been doing for the last month, building fogones!
You may ask, what on earth is a fogon? Here we go. Fogones are brick cookstoves that use firewood, but are much more efficient than cooking on an open flame. It also has a chimney to pull out the smoke and an oven.
PC Health Sector is pretty keen on building them because they fulfill many needs and are relatively cheap and easy to build. Fogones use less firewood than cooking on an open flame (yay less global warming) and are also healthier to cook on since there is far less smoke to inhale and cause respiratory infirmaties. Having an oven also allows people to bake things instead of fry them and the 4-hole cooktop allows for cooking a variety of things at once.
All and all, for about the equivalent of about 80-100 USD it improves the quality of life for a family a LOT, especially the ladies and kids.
And I have so far made 8 fogones, the pictures you see are of the last one I did today with Soledad, the volunteer from Tajy. She biked 15k to Caazapa and took a bus the rest of the 7k to my site. Shes awesome!
Making a fogon starts for me around 8am. I bring all my tools to the house where I am going to make it and survey the spot. Usually its inside a kitchen, but today you can see from the pictures we built it outside. Fogones are pretty big (6ft long by 2ft wide), so many people elect to build another room for it or enlarge their kitchen to fit it. This family is going to build the new room around their fogon to be the kitchen and the old kitchen is going to be made into a modern bathroom.
As a part of the “contrapartido” (part that each family has to contribute) to receive a fogon, the families have to supply me with somebody to make the mezcla (mortar) for the bricks. Its really easy, just red dirt and water, but if I had to do it alone, there's no way I could get done in one day. Today the husband and a neighbor boy were both on hand to make mezcla, which was awesome. While they are starting to make mezcla I usually lay out the bricks and do all of the measurements to make sure its really nice and square and in the spot that the senora wants it (after all she's going to be the one using it).
Laying out the first layer takes a little bit of time, but after that it goes pretty fast. Seven layers like so to make the base, which then gets filled up and capped off. Usually one would use dirt to fill the base but you can really use anything hard. In others I've put glass bottles (popular choice since there's no recycling here), old broken bricks or roof tiles, or rocks.
After its all filled up and capped off with a layer of bricks, its time to work on the arms for the cooktop and the box for the oven. After three layers on each, I put on the iron cooktop (its heavyyyyy, but these also last forever if taken care of) and add rebar to suspend the oven. In order to have a nice hot oven, it needs to have at least 7cm around each side for the air to circulate. Two more levels then put in the aluminum chimney. Since this one was outside, the chimney was really easy, but other times I haven't been so lucky. To make the hole for the chimney on Monday I had to use an old fashioned auger (looks like a corkscrew but HUGE) to make holes in a wooden board and then knock the pieces out with a machete since we didn't have a saw. I've also learned how to chisel out bricks with a piece of rebar and a hammer to make a hole in a brick wall without bringing the house down.
After that the only thing left is to top it off. This is the trickiest part (besides keeping the whole thing level and square which remains bastante dificil for me) because you have to use rebar and then lay the bricks on top and put mezcla in all of the spaces without it falling through. If its good mezcla, with lots of clay, no problem, but if its got a lot of sand, it will fall through and I've had to go find different dirt to use for this part. One layer more on top to cover it up and ya esta! Opama! (done, in spanish and guarani). By this time its around 2 or 3pm and my workday is over. Not too bad for an amateur albanil (mason)!
