Nancy Sanford Hughes

When I was in Guatemala, one day Irma, this lovely indigenous woman came into the kitchen, and she said my hands were burnt shot at the age of two because I fell into an open fire in my family's home. You see that, you make a difference. My husband was a physician so after my husband died I always wanted to go on medical team, and I didn't think you could go unless you were a doctor or a nurse so I offer to do whatever there was to do, which was the cook in the kitchen. When I was in Guatemala, one of the things we saw was that the most dangerous activity a woman in a developing world can undertake is cooking for her family. Most of these women spend all day cooking indoors over smooky open fires, and most of them have a baby on the front of or a baby on the back so that baby is inhaling so much smoke as equivalent 03 packs of cigarettes a day. I saw babies whose lungs were so choked with creosote they couldn't intubate them, they couldn't put the tubes down their throats and so they couldn't save the babies' lives. It makes me cry because I just think of how people live and how I live. I'd heard of few efficient stoves. I knew that was a way to get rid of those open fires in the homes and so we started this initiative to establish factories to produce and sell stoves, and at that point that was the beginning of Stove Team International. What we did was we developed Ecocina, which is a portable stove. It saves 50% of the wood that is being cut, it saves 70% of the particular matter, and carbon emissions, and the exterior is cool to the touch even after you've been cooking for sometime. To date we have started 06 factories in 5 countries. I want this to go on forever that is why we are establishing factories rather than just