Summary of Soknay's Reply to our Questions

Cooking:

Soknay Sorn (Sustainable Cambodia's National Coordinator) wrote back to us, answering the questions that we asked. In summary, the Cambodian villagers are suffering from a variety of health problems resulting from smoke inhalation from the use of inefficient cook-stoves. These include skin and respiratory diseases, eye damage, and increased susceptibility to influenza and TB. Cooking is done on a traditional 3-stone support for a pot, or an improved clay stove available at the market. The most commonly used cooking containers are 30x25cm aluminum pots used to boil water for drinking, and cook rice and soup. There is the possibility of needing to grill food at one point, but it sounds like an occasional practice. We didn’t get a really clear answer on the quantity of wood used, and need to clarify (“At lease the cook used 8-12 pieces of wood for this 3 times cooking. Each piece should not be less then 40cm long and the diameter about 0.03cm.” Not sure if this is for each meal, and if the wood is really 3/10 of a millimeter in diameter?!)

For this reason, I recommend that we design or choose an efficient stove and biogas burner optimized for boiling large quantities of water… i.e. strong consistent heat supply over a relatively small footprint.

One possible setback to digestion is the fact that, culturally, cooking is done by each family unit independently, while most families have less than two large mammals (cattle, buffalo, or swine). Space doesn’t seem to be a problem for the digester, and clay sounds like the material of choice for the stove.

Water/Health:

The villagers, for the most part, rely on over the counter medication and traditional medicine for health problems. There are cases of water-bourne diseases. Ninety percent of the population drinks untreated water from the source (usually surface water), but some is obtained by boiling or treating with a biosand filter. We asked them about the bathrooms, which may have been a mistake in semantics… I believe we wanted to know information about “latrines”. Also, the villages conserve resources, and no food is wasted. But perhaps in the city there is a bit more organic waste that could run the digester at the school.

There seems to be a bit of room to help advise some BMP’s for their agricultural methods, i.e. increasing the use of mulches would cut down on water need and wouldn’t be too hard to implement.

It sounds like there won’t be any problems with cultural clashes, and we’ll be taken care of. Apparently some western volunteers get malaria medication, while others don’t do any vaccinations. (TB might be a good one to get…) The answer about car rental was a little unclear, it appears that it may cost $35/day for a car and $60/day for a minibus.

Feel free to comment if I didn't summarize something well, or if you have any input!
-Jon