Ana and Juan Luis live on an isolated a cow pasture in a two-story modest stick frame house set upon the scenic mountainside of San Vicente. After several years of subsistence farming, this hardworking family decided that Juan Luis would get a part-time job in San Jose as a security guard and gardener. The extra income and formal employment allows Ana and Juan to obtain health insurance and send their daughter to a boarding school in nearby Puriscal. Though they have to live with relatives in San Jose, they luckily inherited the land that their cow pastures and home stand on. So though their home is a 20-30 minute hike from the road and lacked walls, a ground floor, electricity and running water, they proudly set up house for half the week there.
The Ranch got to know Ana and Juan when the Ranch’s Solar Energy Institute installed a small solar panel on their roof to power four light bulbs. Ranch interns Britt, Taggert, Erin and Carolyn visited the family to see how the installation was working (great!) and to see if there was anything else that the interns might be able to help with. Ana expressed concerns about the lack of protection inside the house from the torrential downpours of the rainy season, as well as the oppressive smoke created by her cooking situation, which was essentially a campfire inside shielded from the wind by some sheet metal. Unfortunately the sheet metal also made it more difficult for the smoke to escape. Thus two projects were born: create a more private and protected space upstairs with walls and by framing out a new room for Ana’s teenage daughter, and build a “rocket stove.” A rocket stove greatly reduces the smoke emitted and amount of fuel inputted by using a 5 or 6 inch L-shaped stovepipe (see link). We decided to encase the stovepipe in cob so that when the pipe burned out, the stove would still be intact and usable.
The planning process involved many trips over the river, through the woods and up the mountain to talk with Ana. The hike up to the house was always eventful in one way or another. We saw a sloth and an iguana, a Jesus Christ lizard (walks on water!) and a huge terciopela snake skeleton. After the big windstorm we also saw hardly any of the trail, which meant a trail maintenance day before the big work weekend. Over the course of several weeks of treks up to Anna’s to plan and get to know them, we were treated to all sorts of unexpected “comida tipica,” that felt more like exotic and gourmet fare for us: a baklava-like coconut filling, red beans with plantains, pork, chicken, pinto, sausage and potatoes, tortillas, baloney sandwiches and refrescos of all flavors. We also learned new vocab words like “toro” to replace our own butchered versions (“vaca hombre” kept us laughing for weeks).
About a week into our planning, we were happy to find out that the 15 students in the month-long Aerie Backcountry Medicine EMT class were psyched to help us during a work weekend. Thus our planning focused on the big weekend and finishing with a smaller crew early the next week. When the big weekend arrived, the students worked their medically trained butts off. Saturday’s crew hauled an obscene amount of wood and tools up to the house, and then got to work with gusto, deconstructing the existing stove and dancing up a cob mix for the new one. The wall crew got into a rhythmic groove of measuring, cutting, joking and hammering. Juan Luis ran around setting up ladders and sawing boards. Sunday’s rocket stove crew sat in a circle around the stove, cobbing and singing the day away. By the end of the weekend, over half the work had been completed, and Dr. Love had volunteered to build shutters for one of the new windows. Anna and Juan repeatedly expressed their gratitude, saying they didn’t know gringos (non-Central Americans) could work as hard as ticos (Costa Ricans)! After two more days of work the following week by Ranch volunteers and interns, the building was complete, with characteristic Ranch love infused into details like the smoothly sanded guanacoste sills upstairs, the live wood window-shutter handle and the spirit tree sculpted into the cob surface of the rocket stove.
Many thanks, again, to the Mastate Charitable Foundation for funding the project, and to all the Aerie students and Ranch regulars who flexed their muscles to go over the river and through the woods to Juan and Ana’s.
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