The House of the Thousand Days

A health organization, PRESANCA (Regional Program for Food Security and Nutrition), came to Perquín to build a small facility designed to promote better nutrition among pregnant women and their children in the first two years of life. That’s when our brains and nervous systems develop and if one doesn’t receive proper nourishment during that period, many problems with lifelong repercussions ensue.

The little house, called “Mi Casita, la Casa de los 1000 Días,” was to include various ecological features as well, including a water filtration system, organic gardens, and a bed of vermicompost (earthworm castings). They signed me up because I knew how to build cocinas mejoradas, the improved cookstoves that we built in Callanca when I was a volunteer in Peru.

PRESANCA came to town promising that they’d finish the house in 15 days using all-volunteer labor.

Some of us were skeptical.

The volunteer part was no joke. The first day of construction 25 kids from ages 5 to 16 showed up to help. Most of them just got in the way but much enthusiasm was generated. The rugrats mainly played games, sang songs and painted plastic bottles that would be used to outline the organic gardens. The older kids helped haul wheelbarrows of fill dirt and begin laying the cinderblock foundation.

The total budget was $5,000 and they allocated $150 to the “ecofogón”—the Salvadoran term for cocina mejorada. That seemed like a fortune to me since in Peru we used to build them for $50–$75 apiece.

Fortunately, I’d brought the plans for the stove with me from Peru to the U.S. and  then from the U.S. to El Salvador. I put together a materials list and Melvin and I—Melvin was the engineer assigned to the project by the Mayor’s Office—submitted the list to PRESANCA.

It took about two weeks for all the materials to arrive. First people kept losing the materials list so I’d have to rewrite it again. Then they told me that the materials list had reached the Mayor’s Office and that they’d order the materials when they ordered the materials for framing the house.

PRESANCA kept telling me, “We’ll start tomorrow!” or “We’ll start the ecofogón next Tuesday!” Then I’d show up on Tuesday and still no materials. Work on the house continued.

Finally the bricks arrived, 200 of them, which was a treat because in Peru we’d used adobe—big chunks of dried mud mixed with straw—to construct all parts of the stoves other than the surfaces that came into direct contact with the fire. “We’ll start tomorrow!” the PRESANCA team told me.

Since they’d told me that four or five times previously, this time I didn’t pay any attention but when I showed up a couple of days later they said, “Where were you? Fifteen kids from the high school showed up to help build the stove.”

The fifteen highschoolers came once again and we did in fact begin building the ecofogón. They were great workers! They mixed mud to mortar the bricks together, learned quickly how to use a level and a plumb and managed to complete the base of the stove in around six hours—the amount of time it took us to build an entire stove in Peru, but still pretty impressive for beginners. Because their hands were covered with mud nobody could answer their cell phone.

The volunteers building the “Little House of the Thousand Days” (those would be the 9 months of a mother’s pregnancy and the first two years of a child’s life) continued to arrive, daily a different group of volunteers. German, a professional carpenter, directed the older volunteers capable of handling tools and laying bricks. Manuel and Brenda of PRESANCA directed the younger volunteers.

The group of highschoolers and I finished the base of the cookstove, the “cámara de combustión” (combustion chamber, where the burning of the firewood takes place), the basic armature of the stove body, and set in place the “losa”—the heavy, concrete stovetop that Melvin and I had fabricated one day during the weeks we were waiting for materials to arrive.

German then helped me finish the stove. We erected the chimney and German applied a coating of concrete with a smooth finish to the entire stove to improve its appearance and correct some of the eccentricities introduced by the highschoolers’ sometimes creative use of the level and plumb. We spent less than $100 of the $150 budgeted.

The house that was to have been built in 15 days took 50 days to complete. To be fair, we could’ve probably finished it in a month but Perquín’s Festival de Invierno intervened and construction was put on hold for more than a week.

The inauguration took place on August 15. The heads of the institutions who’d provided volunteers and those of us who’d been the foremen of work crews received certificates of recognition. I was waiting in the audience for the Mayor to call my name when a little girl named Diana, whom I’d talked to a few times in town, dragged a plastic chair over to where I was sitting, climbed onto the chair, grabbed my hand and held it tightly. When the mayor announced my name Diana and I came forward together to accept the award.

Diana was fascinated by the certificate, to her it was the equivalent of The Presidential Medal of Freedom or a Nobel Prize. I figured that Diana deserved it as much as I did since her class of kindergarteners had also put in their time as volunteers, painting plastic bottles, so later that day I went to her house in Perquín and gave it to her.