A Chimney for Nellie

Jeff Moss, EWB-MSU President

There are five of us, crouched in the dirt on the side of a dusty road in rural Kenya. The sun sits perfectly overhead, baking the rusty red dirt we’re drawing in. A few clouds hang overhead, but none venture close enough to block the sun's rays.

We’re in the middle of a row of shops patched together from corrugated tin roofs and hand cut wood, working with our John, one of our Fellows and the owner of a metal shop, to design a chimney for our host families’ cooking hut. Chad, Jonah and I (Jeff) are scratching in the dirt with sticks, trying to communicate our design with a man who speaks no English. Without John's help, there’s no way we could get this figured out. Even with him, I’m not sure if we’re all on the same page.

We’re hoping to fabricate a chimney to ventilate Nellie’s cooking hut so that she can cook each day without inhaling a great deal of smoke. All the cooking here, and in many other parts of the world, is done with fires, which cloud the cooking huts with a thick haze of smoke. Nellie and millions of other women breathe this smoke for hours each day, which leads to many respiratory problems. We’ve been helping with the cooking a bit, but we must step outside often to give out lungs some fresh air.

As a gift for hosting us, we’ve decided to build a chimney for the cooking area, which we hope will ventilate the cook hut and provide Nellie with cleaner air to breathe. It’s not as easy as a trip to Home Depot, but I think we’ve managed to communicate the design pretty well. We’re waiting now, doing some journaling and other work in our office in Khwisero market, and we’ll see in a few hours what the final product looks like.

Tomorrow or the next day, we’ll install the system and find out how well it works. All this will cost us around 25 US Dollars and a day’s worth of work, and we hope it will make a small but noticeable difference in the lives of the family that has been so gracious to us over the last two weeks.