Smokeless stoves
by Anton Zuiker on September 4, 2024
When I woke this morning and did a quick check of the headlines on the NYTimes and Washington Post, one story caught my attention: the Post has a long piece about an initiative to distribute cooking stoves across Mozambique and other countries as part of the carbon credits industry. The stoves, made of clay bricks and a few pieces of metal, turn out not to have held up. (Here’s a gift article link to the full story.)
As I read the article, I was looking for mention of BioLite, a company that makes better cookstoves and solar-powered lights for the American consumer. They also distribute some of these across India and Africa to promote better health through smokeless cooking. I wrote about the many BioLite products I use in Lights up.
BioLite was not mentioned in the WaPo article. Nor were other ways to make smokeless stoves, such as the concrete form used in Vanuatu.
I don’t seem to have ever written about the smokeless stove that we used on Paama. When we learned we would be assigned to Liro Village, where are training was held. As we returned to Port Vila for our swearing-in ceremony, Erin and I paid some men from Liro Village to construct the concrete, wood-burning stove in the standalone kitchen off of the house we would be using. A pipe sent most of the smoke up and out of the kitchen, and the fire heated pots over two round holes in the top of the counter. We also had a two-burner gas stove inside for heating the tea kettle, and we cooked quite a few meals on the concrete stove.
When my father visited us on Paama for the first time, he and I paid to have a smokeless stove built inside the kitchen of Leah and Noel, our host family. They used their stove regularly but they also continued to make open fires outside for roasting yams and manioc or heating lava stones to steam laplap.
Last weekend I made my annual batch of homemade hot sauce (photo above). As I’ve done the past few years, I cooked the vinegar and peppers on the BioLite HomeStove outside to keep from filling the house with chile fumes. This stove is the model that’s meant for low-income areas in other countries, but I was able to buy it during a short window when the company offered in the U.S. I enjoy using this stove, but it was a hot day even before I stood over the boiling hot sauce.
I plan to make a couple more batches of the hot sauce, but now I have a portable induction cooktop burner that I can plug into the outlet in the garage and cook inside its shade. So, smokeless.
Lunch reading
by Anton Zuiker on September 3, 2024
At a dinner party the other night, our friends got to talking about the books they are reading (and writing). I was reminded of how enjoyable it is to get lost in a novel and informed by well-written nonfiction books. One lasting memory: The summer I was a young magazine editor in Cleveland, I spent my lunch breaks sitting on a bench in University Circle reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. (My previous blog post about that book.)
Earlier this year, I read The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. He’ll be the guest of honor, joining by Zoom, for the DCRI Reads book club next week. As a warmup, my colleague Jenny and I hosted a watch party of the movie My Own Country, based on Verghese’s memoir of his time as a doctor in Tennessee during the early AIDS epidemic. I also read that book in Cleveland—I was working at Booksellers before I got the job at Northern Ohio LIVE—and it shifted my career focus to medical journalism. (See this post, and this short article from Duke Today in 2009.)
Now I’m reading Moonbound, the latest novel by Robin Sloan. I even took it to lunch today, reading it in the Durham Food Hall as I ate a pizza.
I track my books through Micro.blog, which has a good Bookshelves feature. Find my reading list on Wan Smol Blog.
Draft night
by Anton Zuiker on September 2, 2024
My brother, Joel, loves the Minnesota Vikings and fantasy football—he’s been inviting me for years to join him at a game in the Twin Cities and to pick a team for a league. I’m a soccer player, of course, so have never engaged in this football fantasy.
Until now.
Joel was not able to join us at the big family reunion in Colorado in July, but he invited his brothers and cousins to participate in an ESPN league, and a bunch of us agreed. Tonight was our draft, and it was quite fun, in part because we gathered in Zoom to talk and joke and help each other learn the rules and strategies for selecting a team. I called my team Sugar Rush, and I have no idea how I’ll do week to week.
Oh, and right after Thanksgiving, I’ll be meeting Joel in Minneapolis to attend the Vikings game against the Arizona Cardinals. (In 2016, I ran past the Vikings stadium on a cold start to the Twin Cities Marathon.)
The fish in Vanuatu
by Anton Zuiker on September 1, 2024
At work, a colleague asked a faculty member in the Nicholas School of the Environment for tips about the ArcGIS StoryMaps tool for creating visual reports about places around the world. When the faculty member shared examples of what her students had produced using StoryMaps, my colleague quickly forwarded the list to me with a simple message: Vanuatu!
I scanned the list and found the link to The ‘happiest’ fishers and threats to their fisheries, a stunning report from Christopher Watt. He’s a Duke graduate student who spent nearly a year in Vanuatu on a Fulbright U.S. Student Research Grant.
Looking at Watt’s photos and reading about the changes in how ni-Vanuatu fish in the seas around the island, I thought about Noel Timante. He was my host and friend (he considered me his brother) on Paama, and he had a yellow wooden boat that he used to fish beyond the reef — when he wasn’t up in the hills tending his many gardens with Leah. Because of Noel, Erin and I enjoyed many dinners of fresh tuna and red snapper.
Noel died in 2002, a couple of years after we finished our Peace Corps service (recorded in this blog entry). I miss him. I miss sitting with him on the black-sand beach at Liro Village as the sun sets over the calm Pacific Ocean, all those unseen fish on the move up and down the archipelago.
Twisting in my memories, and soccer
by Anton Zuiker on July 28, 2024
Weeknotes for July 22-28, 2024
Big-league soccer returned to Chapel Hill on Tuesday with a friendly match between Manchester City and Celtic FC. The rain storms stayed away and the night was beautiful. Our family and cousins (including one who flew in from Idaho after many delays caused by the global IT issue) filled 9 seats not far from the pitch, and we enjoyed the game. Celtic was victorious 4-3.
It did rain later that night, so the next morning I went slowly up the gravel drive. Sure enough, there was a box turtle to document. This one had massive scars from some traumatic injury in the past.
Erin took a quick trip to Boston for a conference and was back late Friday night, so we planned a date for Saturday, a wine tasting at nearby Rocks & Acid Wine Shop. The wines were Italian, cold and light and refreshing, with some tasty food by the chef of Chapel Hill restaurant Osteria Georgi (one of our new favorites). After that, we walked two doors up to Market & Moss for dinner, then across the street to see the entertaining Twisters (a good short Atlantic article about the director here). We walked halfway home, came upon friends, chatted until Anna drove up to take us there rest of the way.
There’s a scene in Twisters, toward the end, where the main character Kate is standing on a bluff, a river below and a storm in the distance. That was so close to a memory I have: I’m in Mississippi Palisades State Park, looking across the river to Iowa as the sky darkens. My prom date and our friends got into our car for the drive home but were stopped by the storm — a tornado, we were to learn. In 2005 I blogged about that tornado memory. In May of this year, I found a site with historical tornado data and I was able to confirm my memory: an EF01 twister on May 8, 1988 just east of Oregon, Illinois. (I recently recounted that memory in a therapy session as I explored fear and my various responses.)
My 2005 blog post also mentions “steady gales that tried to blow me off the top of the Oahu pali.” I lived in Honolulu after college, and in December 1992 a high school friend came to visit. We joined the hiking club for the strenuous Puu Heleakala hike on the Waianae coast. The winds at the top made me nervous, but it was the blister from my new hiking boots that would get infected and send me to the hospital for a shot of penicillin.
This week I firmed up my plans for a September visit to Chicago and DeKalb. I’ll join my cousins for “An evening with Goose” (a jam band, read this Atlantic profile) at the Salt Shed, meet a college buddy for dinner, then head west to visit relatives in DeKalb, where I spent my high school years. Looking at a map to confirm a memory of where I played pick-up soccer on summer evenings, I noticed there’s a “seed to spirit” bourbon distillery south of town called Whiskey Acres, and as I learned more about the farming family behind the distillery, I realized that I know that “fifth-generation farmer and self-proclaimed ‘recovering attorney’ turned distiller” — Jamie Walter is the friend who hiked with me to the top of Puu Heleakala.
In work Slack this week I posted this:
Librarians are the best! I wanted to confirm a childhood memory so contacted the librarian at the university in my home town. Asked and answered. I regularly contact the Duke librarians for help. Remember them, and thank them!
I’ll add here my thanks to the librarians at UH Manoa for digitizing the Honolulu Weekly, that wonderful newsweekly that helped me make the most of my time in Honolulu. (I was able to confirm the hike details in the Dec. 16, 1992 issue).
Oliver joined me for pick-up soccer Wednesday night (soggy and sloppy) and this morning (hot but we played long). I had a perfect view up the field to watch him take the ball, dribble and juke his way toward goal, then curve a shot into goal, a bit like Oscar Bobb for Manchester City in Kenan Stadium on Tuesday (Bobb signed Oliver’s City jersey at a pre-match event).