Making solar cookers in Kinshasa

I was living in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, when I first heard of solar cookers. At first, my mother and I were incredulous that all you needed to cook food and pasteurize water was a simple device made of cardboard, aluminum foil, and a heat-resistant plastic bag, on top of a regular black pot. The vast majority of people in Kinshasa rely almost entirely on charcoal to cook their food, which has resulted in severely degraded forests within a 200 km-radius ring around the city(1). The problem grows worse every year. And it is certainly not limited to Kinshasa. According to the World Health Organization, half of the world’s population uses firewood to cook (2). With charcoal and firewood being so hard to get, so dirty to burn, and so destructive for the environment, solar cookers seemed too good to be true. How could something so cheap and simple not be widespread already?

We had to see it for ourselves, so we ordered a “Cookit” from Solar Cookers International. We tried something simple first, white rice. Even though we had read it would work, it was still a shock when we opened the lid and saw a steaming pot of fully cooked rice, with no apparent source of heat – no flames under the pot, no hot oven. It was hard to believe, but it was just good old sunlight that had done the job.

We then tried out different recipes. Vegetables, beans, meats, it could do it all. Everyone noticed that the food was tastier than usual, as slow-cooking preserves more of the food’s nutrition than regular cooking. In many ways, it was also easier to cook this way, because we didn’t have to watch the pot. We could just set it out and pretty much forget about it. A timer set for 30 minutes would remind us to go nudge it slightly so it would face the sun again. If we did forget it though, no problem! The worse that could happen is that the sun would move and the cooking would slow down. This was a big bonus point for me, as I was known for being absent-minded and leaving food on the stove or in the oven to burn. It was impossible to burn food in the solar cooker, as temperatures never got high enough. So you could reduce the amount of oil or butter and water, and the pot was always easy to clean.

These cooking experiments convinced us that indeed, solar cookers really do work, and quite well at that. The next step was to make one ourselves. We printed out the online instructions, and set to work. The hardest part was getting the measures right for a full-size template from the one-page image on the computer screen. My mother made her own image with instructions on how to do this, called the “Happy Planet Cookit,” which I can send to anyone interested. It took my mother and me about two hours to make one Cookit panel, including cutting out the cardboard pieces, taping them together, gluing on the aluminum foil and cutting the extra off, and making the desired folds and cuts. See these links for pictures of making the solar cookit panels: https://picasaweb.google.com/108485528695279638079/SophieSStories# and a video of me, my mother and sister cooking a vegetable mix in the Cookit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYc1gms0ru8&list=UUWGPGJGy3gox06Isu9MBLNQ&index=3&feature=plcp

We made sure our homemade Cookit panel worked just as well as the one we had ordered by using it to solar cook more food. Finally, we wanted to show this technology to people who might really benefit from it, in the hopes that they would like the idea and be motivated to build their own Cookits. We built two more Cookit panels, and decided to search for the other components in Kinshasa, to see how easy it would be for locals to make their own complete Cookit. Not surprisingly, we couldn’t find any turkey oven bags – in fact I think it’s hard to find turkey oven bags anywhere outside America, as other cultures don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and find other ways to cook turkey if they do at all. Although there are other ways to get around the problem of heat retention through a plastic heat-resistant bag (glass bowls, for example), we figured we would just use our turkey oven bags for the time being and order some more bags from the US if needed. At 50 cents apiece from SCI, these were affordable to most locals. Although there is no functional postal service in Kinshasa, non-governmental organizations usually had some way of obtaining needed items from abroad – often just by asking a friend to buy it on their next trip home and bring it back in their suitcase. Plastic bags hardly take up any room. Next came the pot issue. Finding a black pot that was more or less airtight and not too thick was a very hard task. We could not find the right kind of pot no matter where we looked - on the streets, in open-air markets, and even in the expensive stores meant for the few rich and/or privileged Kinshasa dwellers (incuding Embassy and UN workers). Cheap pots abounded, but they were all shiny aluminum, and were of such poor quality that their lids barely fit on them, as both the lid and pot were so easily deformed. We considered painting some of these black, but did not know where to get non-toxic paint (there are ways to make your own, which we later found out). Ironically, the problem of finding black pots in the field wouldn’t really be a problem in most cases, because all these shiny aluminum pots soon become black from sitting over smoky charcoal fires. Finally, we settled for a greyish pot that was a bit too large for solar cooking, and decided to make the best of it.

References (indirect) (1) http://www.jembala.eu/Download/Jembala_Mampu_CatherinePaul_14102011.pdf (2) http://www.she-inc.org/

Solar cooking in Kinshasa village, Day 1

My mother arranged for a two-day trip to a remote village called Menkao about three hours from downtown Kinshasa where some nuns we knew were working. For accompanying pictures and videos, see: https://picasaweb.google.com/108485528695279638079/SolarCookingInDRCongo# The village chief, a humble and affable man, came to greet us. After some small talk with the nuns, chief, and other villagers, we asked if we could set up the solar cookers, as it was getting late already and we had to take advantage of the sun. We had brought rice and beans in coconut milk to solar cook and now put them in the pots with some water and spices. We did not have a pot for the third panel, so we tried putting a cassava tuber in the middle for faster drying. My mother took a video of our demonstration, available at: http://youtu.be/bY7ANWme3Sc with the village chief translating my explanations from French into Lingala. In the first part of the video, you can hear me describing how we made the panels ourselves out of cardboard and aluminum foil, and the village chief relaying this information to the villagers. This new technology quickly drew a crowd, as they were all eager to know about this strange-looking contraption. My favorite parts are the reactions of astonishment by one man as he touches the pots and sees how hot they are. This man later said (as seen in the video) that there must not be anything in the pots, or maybe the food was already cooked! So we opened the pot up to show him the uncooked beans in coconut milk. We lost a lot of built-up heat in the process, but we had to prove we weren’t trying to trick them!

After the demonstration, the village chief offered to show us around the village while the food cooked. He showed us fields of eggplants, among other crops. We walked around the village, and he introduced me to various people. Typical village houses were made of mud brick walls and thatched roofs. Although villagers didn't have much in terms of material possessions, they seemed to be content, and were all friendly and welcoming without expecting anything in return. I saw many three-stone fires outside of homes emitting a lot of smoke which was easy to smell even from far away. All the pots were pitch black from years of being exposed to smoke – but they had most likely started out silvery and shiny like all the pots we had seen in the markets. The village had one small generator, which was mainly used to charge up everyone’s cell phones. Meanwhile, the sky had gotten cloudy, and newcomers had gathered in front of the solar cookers and were blocking the light. After explaining that the cookers depended on sunlight to work, they cleared the way. We reoriented the cookers, hoping the clouds would disperse later on, and went for a snack with the nun who spent most of her time in the village and had helped to raise funds for and manage various projects such as building the school and rainwater reservoir. She kept a lot of food and snacks in a large cooler/refrigerator, which she had installed for the benefit of the whole village. I then took a break from the heat in the little room they had set up for guests in the unfinished school. My mother left soon after that (notice how muddy the Jeep got in bringing us here!). I went back to check on the solar cookers, and found that several village women had gathered to watch the solar cookers. It reminded me of how people in the US would gather around a TV set, and at first I found it mildly amusing how they seemed to be entertained by completely motionless pots, as if expecting them to start dancing. But I realized this was more of an opportunity for them to chat and socialize, and I too took this moment to talk with the French teacher (one of the only villagers who spoke French) about her life and experiences in the village.

After an hour or so, we decided to check the solar cookers, as there was little point in continuing with the sun so low and a cloudy sky. The rice was almost completely cooked, and I gave it to one of the women to finish cooking in her home. The beans were hardly cooked, however. So the French teacher put it on the fire. We cooked it over the fire for over an hour, but the beans still showed no signs of softening. We concluded that these beans must have been bad from the start - they were probably too old, meaning they had dried out completely and would no longer absorb water and were therefore non-cookable. Thus ended the first day of solar cooking trials in the field. Not much of a success, but this was to be expected, given our late start, cloudy day, and old uncookable beans.

Solar cooking in Kinshasa village, Day 2

The next day I explored more of the village area in the morning (see pictures), and then learned how to make mpondu to put in the solar cooker. Mpondu is a local dish made from ground cassava leaves cooked in palm oil. The French teacher showed me the different steps. First she dried the leaves by tossing them continuously in a pot over an open fire. It’s still a mystery to me how she managed not to burn her hands while doing that. She was far more agile and her hands were a lot tougher than mine, I guess. The leaves eventually wrinkled and shrank. We dumped them in a bucket and soaked them in water. She then wrung the water out of the leaves, which required far more strength than I had, and used a large mortar and pestle to crush them. It seemed like at least half an hour of pounding and crushing. This is really hard work – that stick was not light. I tired myself out after about 5 minutes. I let the teacher and other woman do the rest – you can see from the pictures how strong and healthy these women are from doing these chores on a daily basis. No need to go to the gym when you’ve got mpondu to make!

It was past noon when we put the cassava leaves in the solar cooker with the palm oil. The sky was cloudy again, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. Before eating lunch, they showed me how they use the cassava tuber. Cassava is a major staple in many developing countries, but it must be properly processed in order to destroy cyanogens (substances that trigger cyanide production when eaten – cyanide is a potent poison). There are different ways of processing cassava, but the tubers are usually peeled, soaked in water at least overnight, then laid out in the sun to dry. They can then be finely ground in the mill to make flour, which is used to make all kinds of meals and pastries. Cassava can also be fermented to make alcoholic drinks.

We then had lunch – some fish fried on the charcoal stove. The smoke was asphyxiating – it burned my throat and lungs, and I had to walk away coughing. The women sat right beside it – they had to, to turn the fish over every so often. Either they were less sensitive to the smoke because they were used to it, or they were just doing a better job of hiding their discomfort than I was. According to the World Health Organization, someone dies from wood smoke inhalation every 20 seconds, and respiratory infections are the biggest killers of children under the age of 5 in developing countries. Feeling that smoke attack my lungs, it was easy to understand why.
At the end of the day, we opened up the mpondu pot we had put in the solar cooker. I was half-expecting it not to be cooked – after all, the pot was larger than recommended, more shiny-grey than black, and it had been pretty cloudy all day. But we had left it facing the sun all afternoon, and the mpondu was well cooked. One of the women there took the mpondu back home, balancing the pot on her head, and encouraged all the villagers she met on the way to try the solar-cooked food. They all did and said it was quite good. This is a picture of her family with the French teacher. For video, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyfYwwDth5g&list=UUWGPGJGy3gox06Isu9MBLNQ&index=1&feature=plcp

My ride back to Kinshasa arrived soon after, and we needed to leave as soon as possible to get back at a reasonable hour. I said goodbye and thank you to everyone and took some last minute pictures of people which I promised to print out and send to them later on - these would be the first pictures they would have of themselves. I had talked earlier in the day to some young men who had asked me where they could find more information on how to make and use solar cookers. I gave them some website addresses which they could check out when they went into town, and my email in case they had more questions. I left the pots and solar cookers with the villagers. I unfortunately left the country soon after and have not been in touch with all the kind and friendly people I met in Menkao. I don’t know whether they decided to try solar cooking for themselves, or whether the men I talked to ever even researched solar cookers. But at least they know about the sun’s power to cook food. And who knows - If any of them should become important figures in public policy, they will at least know enough about solar cooking to consider including it in health and environmental programs.