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.