After the Big Check… the Weighty Certificate

I like com­ing up with witty titles too much to not in this case, but actu­ally it was quite an honor to attend and receive a plaque in recog­ni­tion of the work we hav­ing been doing with the solar ovens dur­ing the solar oven fes­ti­val today. The real shame was that Sarah couldn’t be there to receive the recog­ni­tion as well, since I think of this as her project that I have been for­tu­nate enough to help with. The event of the day was a demon­stra­tion of the solar stoves in the munic­i­pal seat of the six smaller com­mu­ni­ties that have the solar stoves — Huim­il­pan, Queré­taro. The full event name was the First Fes­ti­val of Solar Cook­ing Huim­il­pan 2012. We counted 65 of the 80 solar stoves, and the women from the com­mu­ni­ties had cooked every vari­ety of dish — of course includ­ing cake. Sev­eral types of cake. I was busy tak­ing video and pic­tures, but I still man­aged to try two of the cakes. What I didn’t get to try was the cof­fee flan. Guess I will just have to make one myself. Good thing we got the recipe.

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In addi­tion to prac­tic­ing our schmooz­ing skills in Span­ish, extra chal­leng­ing for two intro­verts with­out our extro­vert project leader, Micha and I were shoot­ing video of the women giv­ing us their recipes. I think we man­aged to get about 45 inter­views, and I’m very sat­is­fied with that num­ber. Most of the women were very happy to talk on cam­era about their cook­ing. My goal is to even­tu­ally assem­ble the videos for future pre­sen­ta­tions and tran­scribe the recipes for a cook­book. Explain­ing this goal helped con­vince a few of the shyer women to allow us to inter­view them. I would have been equally wary if I thought some­one was inter­view­ing me for TV. There was a real cam­era crew there, and appar­ently there should be a report on the news tomor­row night.

We man­aged to make a few new con­tacts, and we were taken aback by the plaque. I didn’t com­pletely under­stand what was going on dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion, so I thought that the plaque was going to stay in the town some­where. Well, that is what the other, iden­ti­cal plaque is for, and the one pre­sented to us was ours to take with us. Micha and I kept refer­ring to it as our cer­tifi­cate, because that is an impor­tant part of the cul­ture. Cer­tifi­cates are given for almost every type of events, and so this is now the best cer­tifi­cate ever. Carved in local stone, we just have to fig­ure out what to do with it. We got a ride back to town instead of haul­ing it on the bus, and then we dropped it off at the Peace Corps office. Hope­fully we can get it dis­played somewhere, prominently.

Micha made me laugh out loud and nearly choke on the ear of corn I was eat­ing as she huffed “Fine then, I’ll just take my cer­tifi­cate and go.” I know she is strong, but I really wasn’t sure she could carry it. I learn so much each and every day, espe­cially the great com­mu­nity project days. Micha and I are hop­ing to con­tinue the larger, long-term project with the com­mu­ni­ties by get­ting fund­ing for effi­cient wood-burning cook­stoves. We’re in the mid­dle of writ­ing the grant pro­posal, and, if every­thing goes well, that phase of the project should start in July. We’re not expect­ing any prob­lems since this is such an awe­some project, but we shall see.