Fuel Stoves and Chimp Masks

I got to see my friend Bashir today. He is a student at Knyawara, and I just love him. He is the head boy there, and probably my favorite Ugandan. He helped Ms. Bator and I make our chimp masks and the three of us bonded. But I didn’t get to see him until the late afternoon. In the morning, we got to sleep late, until 9ish. Then we had breakfast, pineapple of course, and headed down the road to meet Beatrice’s sister, Margaret. She works with the Fuel Stove Project, and we went with her to help build a fuel efficient stove for a local family. It’s a really cool, really simple idea actually. The current stoves used by most families are just three piles of two bricks situated at each point of a triangle, and wood is placed in-between the three. It wastes a considerable amount of energy because the heat can escape in many different places; it’s basically just an open fire. The new stoves have a greater resemblance to bread ovens. They are like a box, with a hole where a door might be in a house, and a hole on top to let the heat transfer onto a pot or something. It’s hard to describe, but it makes much more sense than the current model. We were first shown how to construct one, and then we went into the kitchen area and started to build. I helped in applying the second layer of mud, which was used as cement to hold everything together. I got to throw mud at a pile of bricks, every young boys dream, and it actually helped complete something! The finished product was amazing, they have done comparative workshops using the old and new stove, and where the old stove has to use 10 kilos of wood, the new one only uses 4. There was also this adorable little girl walking around. She cannot have been more than 3 or 4 years old, but every time someone pulled a camera out, she started to pose like a seasoned model. It was hysterical. Once the stove was completed, we moved onto our next activity; visiting the clinic with Katya. She says that they only get like 10 patients a day, which must get pretty boring, but the set up of the clinic was nice. We had a nice packed lunch back at the field station, and then we finally got to go to Knyawara. I was so excited, it’s my favorite school. When we arrived, the mask club was waiting for us. Bashir and Steven quickly found Ms. Bator and I, and showed us to our masks. They had been pre-painted with black paint, and were ready to be varnished. They looked so cool with the varnish. At one point, this other boy came to sit with us, and he said that his name was Wilson. He and Bashir are best friends, which I thought was so sweet. They like to read together after school, and if Bashir has a football game, sometimes Wilson goes to watch because he does not play. I also found out that Steven was captain of the football team; he’s a good kid too. I really hope the three of them get to go to secondary school, they are all so smart. Steven and Wilson want to be doctors, which is great, but Bashir wishes to be a teacher when he grows up, how great is that? He is good at it too, he always helps the students around him, and when we were making the first part of the masks, he had Ms. Bator and I do most of it on our own so we could learn better. Making masks was really fun, and we had to leave too soon. After dinner we had a good game of presidents going in the dining hall and Dr. Maloney read everyone’s horoscopes. That was a good laugh. Today was a great day.