Romancing the stove
For hundreds of years, the Inca built stone temples on Peruvian mountaintops. But the Inca are no more, and heaven help the families boiling corn and potatoes on brickwalled
cooktops built by urbanites on vacation.
By Patricia D’Souza
THE INCA WERE MASTERFUL stonemasons. Machu Picchu, their 15th-century sanctuary in the sky,
was built to exacting detail, each block cut to fit tight against the next. On a rainy day
in December, I run my finger along one of the ancient mortarless joints and wonder at this
marvel that has stood for hundreds of years, withstanding earthquakes, waves of tourists
and outlasting the Inca themselves.
I’m no Inca mason. Heck, I’ve never laid a single stone, but I’ve come
to Peru to build a vented stove of adobe bricks with the hope that it will improve the health
of a family living in the country’s northern highlands, where women still cook indoors
over open flames and respiratory illness remains the leading cause of death.
“Christmas is about giving,” says Carol Germain of Barrie, Ont., explaining
why she has chosen to spend a week here while her young kids holiday with their dad on a
beach in Mexico. Lili Cretu, a Romanian chemist transplanted to Oakville, Ont., and Austin
Woods, a housepainter and adventurer from Cranbrook, B.C., round out our group. We bond quickly
over our poor Spanish, nonexistent construction skills and our desire for a meaningful vacation.
We fly to the small city of Cajamarca, where the Inca emperor Atahualpa was captured and
killed by Spanish colonists, effectively ending the 300-year-old civilization. We huddle
together on an eight-hour bus ride, careening along narrow gravel roads that climb higher
and higher into the Andes. At Chota, we bump and jostle for another hour in the back of a
four-wheel-drive truck to our final destination, Cadmalca, a community of 200 families that’s
about 3,000 metres above sea level and served by a single winding mountain road. When I learn
that it’s a 10-minute hike up the side of a mountain in pitch darkness to the Blue
Poncho Lodge, I nearly collapse in a cow patty. Some people splash in the ocean in December.
Others hike up mountainsides for the privilege of mixing cement and laying bricks.
The lodge, our home for the next several nights, turns out to be a dormitory-style abode
of several rooms opening onto a long porch overlooking the surrounding hills and skinny conifers.
It is the only structure in the community with running water and indoor plumbing and I learn
that the facilities were installed only three years ago after the building was purchased
by an Australian with an interest in attracting tourists — and infrastructure funds — to
the povertystricken north.
The next day, we build stovepipes from the corrugated sheets of metal used to roof Peruvian
homes. Our Spanish-speaking guide and instructor, Mercedes Zarata, instructs us in painstakingly
flattening the waves with long wooden sticks, then rolling the flattened sheets and joining
the tubes. It seems inefficient, when I could have packed the necessary hardware in my luggage.
I might have just shipped over a doggone stove. But that would have missed an important point
of the project — learning to live within simple means. For Zarata, who has built 50 stoves,
this is a chance to teach city folk some humility.
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