This video gives a brief overview of our energy projects in Guatemala.

Special thanks to the 2007 TecoTours crew who participated in the filming of this piece, Corey Tatarczuk for doing a awesome job editing, Jonathan Argudo for some sweet flash animation, and our good friends at Wedia for funding the film team who visited us this past summer.

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Update:
I was looking through our photo archives and I found this photograph taken by Deborah Coleman when she was down in Guatemala on a TecoTour in 2006.

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Nicki Jimenez and Meredith Rahman speak on their experiences in Guatemala with us this summer on TecoTours. Bring the Family!

Sunday Nov 11, 3PM
Weston Community Center
20 Alphabet Lane Weston, MA
Rm 303

If you can’t make it, read Meredith’s excellent article about the trip or view the slideshow featuring photography from Meredith, Nicki and Alli Iuliano.

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This past July, ten high school students from Weston came to Guatemala to volunteer with AIDG. Meredith Rahman, one of the participants, wrote a great article about her experiences with us. I based this slideshow on her piece.

Photography by Meredith Rahman, Nicki Jimenez, and Alli Iuliano.

Related Links

TecoTours
Special diary from Guatemala trip
Comunidad Nueva Alianza
Zunil Geothermal Power Plant, Guatemala

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TecoTour volunteers visit Geothermal Plant in Guatemala

One of the volunteers from this summer’s TecoTour, 15 year old Meredith Rahman, wrote a great piece about her experience for our local newspaper.

By Meredith Rahman

Weston - Every morning Carolina wakes up in a sleepy daze and walks on the soft dirt of her kitchen floor, compacted by generations of use. Thick smoke fills the room as kindling begins to burn on the stove. From dawn until dusk, 365 days a year, this smoke infests the room.

Carolina is 7 years old. With every breath she takes, more and more soot fills her developing lungs. Without some help, she will most likely develop the respiratory problems her family and friends have. Fortunately, thanks to an AIDG-designed stove installed by a group of 10 high school students from Weston, Carolina might breathe a bit easier for the rest of her life.

AIDG, a Weston-based nonprofit, has an ambitious agenda. Its goal is to provide basic services such as electricity, sanitation and clean drinking water to as much as a third of the world’s population. Access to these services is essential to breaking the cycle of poverty in developing countries.

Through a combination of business incubation, education and outreach, AIDG helps people get technology that will better their health and improve their lives. AIDG has been working for the past few years creating appropriate technology for poor people. They develop machines that use local resources and are inexpensive to produce.

This year AIDG invited 10 students from Weston to accompany them to Guatemala for both a cultural experience and to provide some additional manpower. We were that group of 10 high school students, nine from Weston High and myself from Phillips Academy, who signed up for 10 days of a “Teco-Tour,” as AIDG billed it. We had a full itinerary of outdoor activities. One day we built a biodigester, another day we toured a geothermal electric plant, but most of our time was spent building the cooking stove that Carolina and her family would use for years to come. It is a properly ventilated stove that burns fuel efficiently, producing a lot less smoke which is routed outside by means of a vent.

Our first few days in Guatemala were spent as any “Weston trip” would - touring, eating and taking too many pictures. Our only worry was showering. We were told that the water was electrically heated and so if we touched the shower nozzle a 40-watt jolt could possibly rocket through our body. The following day our group traveled by private bus that sped down rolling hills. The roads were steep, narrow and without guardrails. We gazed down at deep gorges only a few feet from our windows. Our conversations about the safety of our bus rides typically ended with nervous laughter and an eerie silence. Nonetheless, we arrived in Xela (pronounced “shay-lah”) in one piece. There we got right to work.

Our first task was to build a biodigester, my personal favorite. Its function is to take in human and animal waste to produce fertilizer, to be used on the fields, and methane gas, to be used in stoves. I’m not an engineer, so please excuse me for this crude description. The biodigester is basically a big plastic bag with three holes for waste, fertilizer and methane.

Soon after building the biodigester we moved to Nueva Allianza, the “rural village.” It had a bio diesel factory, coffee and macadamia factories, and its own hotel. However, poverty was everywhere. Few villagers had access to clean drinking water. The schools were dilapidated. We went straight to work.

Our mission was to build two stoves for two families and our group broke into two teams to accomplish this task. Each team was assigned a house in which they were to build a stove. Each morning we hiked up our mini-Everest to the houses we worked at. We stared wide eyed at the machetes used to cut the cement and brick blocks. For three days we measured, cut, leveled, and measured again. Finally we neared the final stages of our masterpiece we had created. Not only could it cook food like other stoves, it used less wood, and most importantly, prevented smoke from entering the living room and into the lungs of adults and children.
We met the family we built the stove for. Dimitri, the father, would smile sweetly as I stammered in broken Spanish to him. Manuela, the mother, was the true head of the household and nothing seemed to get by her. The children and grandchildren ran over to us when we worked and helped us in various tasks, be it mixing the mortar or nailing some wood.

Some in our group remarked how the trip broke their “Weston bubble.” I’ll admit that happened to me too. We often forget how different most of the world is from Weston. We are indeed fortunate to be living in this town and grateful for what we have.

It seems odd now when people honk in anger at me in their cars. We realized what a luxury a flush toilet is and it is a blessing to be able to take a shower without fear of being electrocuted. Our trip to Guatemala seemed like a dream. I met the friendliest and the most hospitable people on earth. They had very little, yet they shared whatever they had with us.

Meredith Rahman is a Weston resident and a sophomore at Phillips Academy.

Original article can be found clicking here.

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About this time last year, we initiated our TecoTour program by bringing a group of AIDG Interns and Friends on a ‘mock’ tour. We built a greenhouse, and visited the organic-coffee growing Community of La Florida. While visiting the Guarderia this week to check up on the solar hot water system, I also peeked into the greenhouse, as it’s at the same site. In our first TecoTour, we helped build the bulk of a greenhouse, using simple plastic sheeting, some tubing, and wire, affixed to a simple concrete block foundation. Now the greenhouse is managed by the Guarderia staff to grow tomatoes, to sell in the market as a fundraiser to help keep their operations running. The photo below is of the TecoTour I participants at a waterfall in the community of La Florida (Near the Guatemalan western coast and the border of Mexico). We hope to continue projects with La Florida, and we are in communication with them regarding a possible weekend mini-TecoTour install of an improved stove for their school. Currently, the children’s lunches at school are cooked on an open fire. The community is excited by the prospect of having an improved stove to reduce the indoor smoke and reduce firewood consumption.

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From July 13th-22 we took a group of 12 from Weston High School on a TecoTour. During the TecoTour I was quite busy and on the road, and didn’t get a chance to blog about it at all. So here’s a belated photo and post regarding one of our activities.

AIDG has long been in contact with a MayaPedal, a project that uses bicycles to create all sorts of machines. Check out www.mayapedal.org to see their bici-maquinas. They have coffee de-pulpers, water pumps, washing machines, corn grinders, and more. We took the TecoTour to their shop outside of Antigua, Guatemala to see other applications of appropriate technologies. After talking to their staff and two American volunteers, we went to a nearby women’s collective “Mujeres en Accion” (Women in Action) that uses a bike blender to make aloe-based shampoo. In the photo above, I’m translating the women’s talk in front of the TecoTour.

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TecoTours Update: Our intern Kristen Radecsky took these pics of the TecoTours biodigester install in Llanos de Pinal.

Andrew F and Julio O

Fred S., Emily L, and Julio O

Erick G, Chris S., Jeremy C., and Ryan H.

The TecoTours team is spending a few days at Comunidad Nueva Alianza building stoves.

More info on Tecotours
Photos from Mayapedal visit
TecoTours 2007 (Flickr set)

More photos to come.

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Last weekend during our Mini-TecoTour, two University of Southern California (Antoinette and Shasta) pre-med students prepared some pumice for the stove. The pumice is used as an insulatory material that helps provide for more complete combustion, creating a more efficient stove.

The construction of stoves is relatively labor intensive, thus making it an ideal group activity for volunteers. We are now in discussions with the womens collective (Junta Directiva de Mujeres) in the Communidad Nueva Alianza for an expanded stove construction program (40+ stoves). Currently the women’s group is taking a week to discuss the project amongst themselves to determine what is the best method of implementation. In the future, we hope to be able to subsidize the cost of the stoves by financing them through similar TecoTours.

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This past weekend, we held our first mini-TecoTour. We took a group of 9 pre-medical students from the University of Southern California to the Communidad Nueva Alianza. The project was to retrofit an ancient stove (likely 100 years old!) that is used in the eco-hotel at the community. The weekend was quite a collaboration, between the women at Nueva Alianza, the USC group, Ana the stove expert, and a partner organization Café Concencia. Special thanks goes to Anne at Café Concencia, Ana, and Elena Kreiger for doing an amazing job with logistics and technical assistance.

Due to the success of the weekend and general interest, we hope to expand the program and offer weekend outreach installations for a number of our technologies in rural communities.

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