fun in the oven

Today was a great day. I made a tin oven! Yesterday I bought a big sheet of tin and today a third year volunteer came to visit my site. We cut out the shape of a box and folded it up into an oven! It sits on top of a wood burning stove and a small grill allows the hot air to circulate around the food. I will try to post a picture of it tomorrow.

I wanted to build the oven for a few reasons. So that I myself could make cookies, breads and casseroles, but also because one day I was sitting around talking to a young lady, (who is about my age with a 3-yr-old son), when she said wistfully, "I want to learn how to make bread!" It was so sad to me, because I knew she would probably never be able to.
Sometimes this country reminds me a lot of a line from (don't laugh) the live-action version of 101 Dalmations. The female lead is a fashion designer in Cruella DeVille's firm. When she tells Cruella that she is going to get married, Cruella says:
"Marriage?! More good women have been lost to marriage than war, famine and disease!"
The women here are capable and smart, but they get stuck in these crappy marriages and don't do much with their lives. I know, I know, raising nine children is a worthwhile thing to do with your life. I just wish they had more options. The girl who wants to make bread, for example, is a really smart lady with a wonderful personality. She could definitely run a small business. She would make an excellent teacher. And she's so good with people, if she were even just a waitress, she would make great tips. Instead she wastes away with her son, while living off of her husband's remittances. She hardly ever even leaves the house.

So anyway, I hope the oven might be a new diversion for her. Another thing you can do with this technology is teach women's groups how to make them. They are so easy and cheap to put together, a women's group could sell them on market day for a profit. Then they can use that income to do their own projects or have a little more power in the community.

At this point, though, all this is merely speculative. We'll see if it works tomorrow!