Case study: Janet Socorro de García
Janet Socorro de García, a 36-year-old woman with three young children, supports her entire family with a street-side tor-tilla
business. Working in a small zinc shack with a dirt floor, one table and two EcoStoves, Janet can make about 250 tor-tillas
every day on each stove [Front cover]. She sells three tortillas for one córdoba (US$ 0.07) and started her business
four years ago when her husband lost his job. Currently, he is still unemployed though his wife admits that he occasionally
finds temporary work. ‘Before,’ she says, ‘we were using a normal fire. You know, of stones and metal.’ Janet continues, ‘I
had horrible pains in my nose from breathing in the smoke and my hair would singe and curl up every day on my head.
With the old stove, there was always smoke and it was much, much hotter next to the open fire.’
Every day, Janet works from five in the morning to six in the evening and then spends the rest of the night processing the
corn for the next day’s tortilla production. She says that her business is ‘very, very important’ and that it ‘completely supports’
the family. Janet only has to add a fraction of the wood to the stove—wood that she once had to buy in massive quantities.
The concept of an economically advantageous stove is welcome because it augments the profit of the family business.
Janet’s sister, Gladys, was highly skeptical of the US $60 purchase of an EcoStove because it seemed an excessive and
unsure investment. While Janet continued to cook tortillas, Gladys watched from her own next door enterprise with cer-tain
mistrust. However, after Janet bought a second EcoStove, Gladys decided to practice working with her sister’s pur-chases
and converted to the modernized cooking practices. Eventually, she bought her own pair of stoves and set up an
identical tortilla business to aid her own struggling family. Janet’s mother, who also lends a hand to her daughters’ busi-nesses
says, ‘Before, we just had a big fire and now there’s no smoke. No one is sick anymore.’
Nicaraguan family. Women who
once complained of constant
breathing problems, headaches or
diminishing eyesight while work-ing
over an open flame, now		 work in the comfort of clear air
and clean conditions.
Cleaner air, however, is not the
only advantageous aspect of an
EcoStove. Whereas families
would once spend a significant
Case study: Blanca Galeano
Across Managua in the neighborhood of Ciudad Jardin, a slight 53 years old
woman named Blanca Galeano gestures towards a row of four EcoStoves (Fig-ure
4). Everyday, Doña Blanca and her three daughters make 2,500 tortillas to
sell in bulk throughout Managua. Originally, she cooked her tortillas on an open
flame, using entire truckloads of wood every season. Rather than health issues,
Dona Blanca complained about the immense amount of wood that was needed
to create her home tortilla operation. Of her group of EcoStoves, Doña Blanca
says, 'They are cleaner, cheaper and have less smoke. Also, I can cook my tor-tillas much more quickly.' With four lit stoves, Dona Blanca can place 70 tortillas
on the combined plancha surface at the same time. 'It's magnificent,' she says.

Though she tried an LPG stove and admits that it was faster for cooking, she says
that using gas is entirely out of the question due to cost. For her business, which
supports twenty family members in one household, fuel wood is appropriate and
cost-effective. Doña Blanca sells 600 of the 2 500 tortillas to the Zona Franca area
of Managua and loads them in a truck every morning at dawn. She sells three tor-tillas for one córdoba, therefore earning 833 córdobas from a daily load of tor-tillas - a sure US$ 62. One of her sons, a mechanic, helps bring in some family
income, but otherwise all of her family is devoted to the small enterprise that cen-tres on the daily use of EcoStoves. Savings in wood expenditures aside, Dona
Blanca says, 'The thing that I like the best about the stove is the cleanliness.'
piece of their income on fire-wood
every day, they currently
save 50% of their fuel expense
because of the energy efficiency.
For Luisa Hernandez, a 45 years
old native of Managua, the depar-ture
from a three-stone stove
style to an EcoStove marked a
dramatic shift in lifestyle.
For many women in Nicaragua,
abject poverty has forced them to
further fend for their families
through small business practices.
With or without an EcoStove,
their lives are treacherously diffi-cult
and require unceasing effort.
Through modernization of energy
uses however, some families have
relieved themselves of obtrusive
health problems and increased
the profitability of their industries.
Savings in fuel wood expenditure,
eradication of stifling smoke and
increased ease of working condi-tions
have facilitated the evolu-tion
towards modernity.
Rogério Carneiro de Miranda is a
Brazilian forester working since 1992
in Central America. Concerned with the
ecological, economical and health
impacts from wide spread primitive
techniques of woodburning, he founded
PROLEÑA, a NGO dedicated to promote
modernization of the fuelwood sector in
Honduras and Nicaragua. (rmi-randa@
sdnnic.org.ni)
Frances G. Tilney is an US undergradu-ate
of history and literature at Harvard
University in Cambridge, MA. She
received a summer grant from Har-vard's
David Rockefeller Center for
Latin American Studies to work for Pro-leña
in Nicaragua. (tilney@fas.har-vard.
edu)
Boiling Point No 47 Autumn 2001 5

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