Charcoal, Clean Cook Stoves, (Part 2) and Tafia

     Earlier this month, Pierre and I spent a week with a team from our church in Silver Spring visiting our sister parish in Baradères. It is a very remote community, difficult to access and very poor. As I mentioned in the earlier post (see Part 1, 03-22-14 post), people in Baradères cut down trees and make charcoal. They use it for cooking and earn a living by shipping the charcoal to PauP where it is sold. There is no propane distributor in Baradères. So unless someone has a truck, there is no easy way to refill a propane tank. The people use charcoal for all their cooking.

     It occurred to me that Baradères would be an ideal site for the Project Gaia alcohol-fueled cook stove (http://www.projectgaia.com/) that I talked about in my post on 03-22-14. I discussed it with Fr. Jacques, the priest with whom we have been working. Fr. Jacques is Haitian and he has been pastor of the church in Baradères for three years. He knows the people and the community. I asked Fr. Jacques what he thought of the cook stoves. He said that they would be well received in Baradères. But what about the alcohol, I thought? Is it available?

     When I explained the main concern of availability of alcohol to fuel the stoves, Jacques invited me to drive over to visit Jean-Claude, the local agronomist and distiller of tafia de Baradères. Tafia is the local rum. Jean-Claude’s distillery is behind a house along the main road that runs through Baradères. The feedstock for his tafia is sugar cane. When we arrived at the distillery, a 38-year-old diesel-powered mill press was huffing away squeezing out juice from sugar cane.

Mill press in action

A pulley turned a wheel that ran the press. A worker was feeding a stack of cut cane by hand into the press. The juice spilled out into a cistern. The bagasse was tossed on to a pile to be burned as fuel for the boiler later. Another worker walked back and forth, carrying five gallon buckets of sugar cane juice to the fermentation house.

     Inside the fermentation house was pure microbiology. Large 55-gallon plastic drums, which serve as fermentation vats, stood in a row filled with sugar cane juice. The liquid in the early stages of fermentation was calm, quiet, dark, and mysterious.

Vats of fermenting sugar cane juice

As we walked along the row, we saw barrels further along in the process. The liquid in these drums was bubbling with microbes at work. Further down the row were the mature barrels. They were frothing to overflowing, brown foam on the surface and bubbles pushing the foam over the edge of the barrel and onto the dirt floor. It smelled like fermentation. It smelled like microbiology. I was ecstatic. These were my friends, microbes. I loved it. I could not believe all I saw. It was like visiting a 19th century distillery, or a moonshiner’s back woods operation. The fermentation process is centuries old. The technology was 19th century. But it still works. The product is alcohol.

     Jean-Claude makes a lot of tafia. Fr. Jacques said that people in Baradères drink a lot of tafia. There is nothing else to do. So Jean-Claude does a very good business. He inherited the distillery from his father and then built a second one. We visited that site as well. There was nothing happening there. The mill press was silent but there was a huge pile of bagasse next to the press-house. The still was in the back, resting, waiting for the next production lot to work its way through.

Bagasse at Jean-Claude's second distillery

     Jean-Claude sells a lot of tafia. He sells his tafia as far away as Cavaillon and Fond des Negres. He said he sold a lot of tafia for Carnaval. He continues to make it during Lent because people continue to drink it. One day as we hiked up to Vincendron, we saw several children on donkeys riding down the trail toward Baradères. We asked them where they were going. They replied that they were going to town to buy tafia (presumably for their parents). The day we left Baradères and drove back down the mountain to Cavaillon, we stopped at a store on the mountain road. Our driver got out and unloaded two one-gallon containers from the top of the Land Cruiser. He handed them to the storeowner, climbed back into the Land Cruiser and we drove off again. I asked Fr. Jacques what that was all about. It was a delivery, he explained. Tafia.

     After our tour of the distillery, I explained the Project Gaia cook stove project to Jean-Claude and the need for a reliable source of alcohol fuel. Could he do it, I asked? Jean-Claude was definitely interested. I was pretty excited after talking with Jean-Claude and I wrote Dan and Brady at Project Gaia. Their response was positive so the next step is to organize a trip to Baradères with Dan and Brady. They can do a demonstration of the CleanCook stove and visit the distillery and discuss alcohol production, price points, and logistics of alcohol supply for the community with Jean-Claude.

     A local alcohol fuel supply would be a huge advantage for Baradères, as it would make the project autonomous. Local fuel production can create jobs for adults as workers in distilleries that produce alcohol fuel. In addition, if we can get people who are making charcoal to transition toward ethanol production (growing sugar cane, recycling agricultural waste, etc.), it is a plus. My hope for Baradères is that they can be alcohol independent, maybe even to the point of being an alcohol supplier for the entire region. That would be a huge economic and environmental boom for the community. By reducing the need for charcoal, you reduce the need to cut down the trees to make the charcoal. You save the trees and, ultimately, the land.

     I am working with my colleagues to explore the possibility of linking a Project Gaia program in Baradères (and maybe in Gressier, as well) with an epidemiology study on respiratory diseases with the goal of measuring the health effects on women and children in households that start using the alcohol-fueled stoves. There are opportunities here to do some good things. Let’s do it.