Simple biomass burning "rocket stove"

Last summer our church went down to Ensenada to work with a local church in Colonia San Carlos to work with the children there by doing VBS for them, and some of the other nearby places like Santa Cuquila, and Mendoza.  This last place is a boarding habitat for farm laborers working in the greenhouses that produce high volume flowers, quite possibly for export into the United States.

What caught my eye is that they are still using "primitive" cooking methods, namely burning wood over a pan or pot, propped up on several rocks.  I love that!  Something very soothing about cooking on open fire.

While surfing on YouTube, I came across what people call "rocket stove," a simple fire chamber designed to pull in air and deliver high heat, not unlike the Dakota Fire Pit (Boy Scouts of America know what I am referring to).  Except it's not an actual rocket stove, because the real thing actually includes a gassifier that produces additional biogas from the initial biomass that is in combustion.

Yet one of the benefits of this simple stove, is that it yields higher temperatures with shorter cooking time and less fuel.  In this project I thought I'd try making the cement rocket stove, molded out of a simple bucket, using fiberglass reinforced crack resistant cement concrete and vermiculite, a gardening soil additive that according to the YouTube DYI content author Gene Lonergan turns your concrete into a kind of a "firebrick chimney."

The cost of the materials in the end is fairly economical, which makes for an affordable solution for a simple stove when you need to cook in primitive conditions with limited amounts of fuel.  In Mendoza, the folks from Oaxaca had nice stacks of fire wood ready for winter.  Provided you have all the tools and a good work space, it should take one person about two hours to complete the project.

List of Materials:

1. A bucket to be used for molding, $3 at Home Depot.  
2. 4" PVC sewer pipe, $11
3. A bag of cement $6 for 80lbs (yields 4)
4. A bag of vermiculite $21 for 2 cubic ft (may yield about 3)
5. a little bit of motor oil to lubricate the sewer pipes
6. some protective gear like mask, eye protection and gloves.

Lonergan says that 80% Vermiculite and 20% concrete is the ratio that you want, which is something I really welcome in the design because concrete alone is simply just too heavy!
If one is to reuse the mold to make more in the future, the design for the materials alone is under ten dollars.

Steps:

1. Cut the PVC pipe into a clean, 45 degree angle.  You need a 12 inch circular saw to do this in one step.  I didn't so I tried to get it cut at Home Depot, but they refuse to cut PVC with their saws, due to what they consider fire hazard (store policy).  I went into a store in Tempe called Woodworkers Source, and a nice gentleman in there heard my plans and he cut it for me, except he didn't have a blade large enough to make the full cut.  I cut the rest with a hacksaw I bought a while back at a 99 Cent Store.  
2. Now you need to cut out a round hole in the bucket where the fuel chamber will seat.  A perfectly round cut is desirable, but it's tricky.  This is where your handiwork skills will come into the test.  I used a knife, being that the Home Depot buckets are of fairly pliable plastic.
3. You mix the vermiculite and the cement in the ratio of 80/20, and I was working in small batches, so as far as water goes, I put in 3 1/2 cups of water per 226 cubic inches (4 x 40oz can) per 1 can of cement.  (I think I mixed about ten batches, lost count).  The mixture should be moist but not soupy.  Too much water will yield a fragile end product.  This initial attempt is quite a lot of guesswork, so this is the part where I am hoping to God that the estimate yields a strong structure.
4. At any rate, you have to tamp the contents, packing them down well.  Gravity will do the other half of the work for you, but at each time, make sure that the pipe ends are seated correctly.  
5. After you fill it to the brim, let it sit there for about one hour.  In my case some excess water was draining out of the bottom, between the pipe and the bucket.  (a watertight seal is not necessary)  It is at this time, you can remove the pipes for later reuse.  I removed the top pipe, and waited a little longer for the bottom.
6. After the stove dries, you are to cure it while sealed in a trash bag for one week, and then let it cure for an additional three weeks before its first use.  (I don't quite understand the reasoning behind this long curing time, but I think that it will be ready just in time for our mission outing to Ensenada in mid December)  

Muslims, Christians, and Jesus

Some interesting information:

The Six Articles of Faith in Islam  (pretty much verbatim, from pages 38-44

1) There is God (Allah in Arabic).  The Muslims somehow believe that the Christian Trinity is comprised of God the Father, God the Son, and the Virgin Mary.  You have to be careful to jump the gun and equate Isa (Jesus) with God.  That would be a shirk, or blasphemy against God.

2) Angels.  Gabriel is an archangel they believe strengthened Jesus.  (in many ways their description of Gabriel sounds like the Holy Spirit).  Other than angels, who make known to people the will of God, are other beings called jinn.  Jinn are not men, nor angels but are something in between which can be either good or evil.  (saved or condemned)  They are often connected with disasters and accidents and are believed to haunt abandoned places and deserts.  Some Muslims will go at great lengths to avoid these jinn, which leads them to act out a variety of superstitious practices.

3) The Holy Books:  the Taureh, the Zabur, the Injil, the Hadith, and the Qur'an.
The first one, the Jewish Torah.  Second, Psalms of David, third, the Gospels (Muslims consider the teachings of Jesus holy)... The Hadith is not a single canonized volume but a series of traditions.  The Qur'an is regarded the final revelation to the last prophet, Muhammad.

4) The Prophets:  Their major prophets are- Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.
"Jesus (Isa in the Qur'an) is regarded as the holiest prophet, without sin, born of a virgin, and, interestingly called 'his word' (Q 4:171)

5) The Day of Judgment:  They share a pretty similar eschatology of judgment, except they are more inclusive.  They believe that Jews and Christians may be saved, while all other infidels will go to hell.

6) Predestination:  Muqaddar, an almost fatalistically deterministic view of one's fate because God is sovereign and supreme.

Mode of Production and the Consumption Function

While engaging in mission is foremost a religious endeavor, there are plenty of models of strategic engagement that are creatively fostered to "bless the nations."  One of these modalities being business as mission (also acronymized as BAM).  Micro loans, promotions of local crafts and indigenous artistry has in many ways not only preserved the dignity and the heritage of some people groups throughout Latin America and some parts of Southeast Asia, but also has provided these folks a fighting chance against the impossible divide between subsistence economy and mainstream markets.

But any such endeavor, any treasure or speck of diamond dust will soon be made all too popularized and exploited by larger industries.  Exploitation is, that it always entails the hope of any smaller group with extremely limited resources being crushed by larger commercial entities that have nearly endless supply of resources moving in tapping the honey hole.  I don't know exactly to what extent, I am avoiding all such research as of yet but the coffee industry reflects of this fact made all to visible by the variety of coffee franchises that are readily visible.  Out here in Arizona, I see Dutch Bros Coffee, Dunkin' Donuts, Coffeebean and Tealeaf, and of course the ubiquitous Starbucks mega franchise dominating the industry.  The concept of "Fair Trade" has entered the picture but drinking coffee for some reason makes you a skeptic.  I am substitious with every sip.

Strictly speaking, coffee and the consumption of its "gourmet" variants have been linked with a certain social class, to borrow the terminology of Marxists, the bourgeoisie.  Even coffee has been marked with classicism.  We have Folgers and Maxwell served out in diners or truck stops, and then we have Peet's potent $2 drip caffeine elixir or the "fair siren's" $6 plus concoctions of sugar and dairy mixed into their espresso shots.  Don't get me wrong, I don't boycott these places, if my friends want to go in there, I will just order a doppio espresso, make a thick syrup with it of raw sugar and nurse that thing for about two hours, just dipping my tongue into it as if I was a fly.

But here is one thing that just came to my attention.  The actual shelf life of a roasted coffee bean is roughly seven days.  Which is to say, that no matter how you try to vacuum pack it, freeze dry it, no matter how you try to extend its shelf life by any kind of preservative methods, for all intents and purposes the idea of "freshness" has long evaporated when you go to your favorite caffeine dispensary.  By the time you get that one pound bag and even though you grind it in your own kitchen, those beans have already lost most of its potency and beneficial properties that are reported to go as deep, as indispensable in some religious ceremonies of the indigenous peoples.  It is reported that coffee was used by sages, during their long hours of prayer to stay awake.

So how do I get my hands on a truly fresh cup?  Well, you gotta find a place that roasts the coffee at least on a weekly basis or roast it yourself at home.  Out here in Arizona, I found one place that serves a pretty decent cup but still, not to the satisfaction of roasting it yourself.  It turns out, that roasting at home is not a complicated process, no more complicated than say, popping popcorn.

 to be continued...

"No ma'am, we're musicians... and we're on a mission from God"

When we think of the word "mission," at least in the Christian context, we are conditioned to think of being sent by God somewhere for some specific purpose.  As emphatically reminded to us by Dr. Charles E. Van Engen during my MC520 Biblical Foundations for Mission course back in 2010 at FTS, "If everything is mission, then nothing is mission."  This word mission then, denotes a divine mandate, a series of tasks, in the order of something very specific that God is accomplishing.  This is also known as Missio Dei.  But it occurs to me that this mission that we speak of can be both explicitly religious or conspicuously irreligious.  This of course, beckons the herald, calling out for a false dichotomy since, the Jews of the Old Testament did not view life in such compartments, to all good Jews, there wasn't this segmenting of a religious life vis-à-vis the mundade (or profane) life.

In the mission of God, there is a sending.  God sends out his agents to proclaim of the Truth.  (not "a" truth, but "The" Truth: an absolutist claim that is exclusive) And this message encompasses a reality that many, if not most people are not aware of.  And this reality is not of a conditioned perception of a finite spectrum, by a lifespan limited by our accepted understanding of life and its physicality, or as some may still called it "philosophical materialism".

But rather than simply discharging duties unto angelic mediators, envoys, prophet messengers, we see God involved in direct intervention through interaction: between epochs defined by their crises, and His response:  1) Adam and Eve came to know evil through disobedience, the remedial action was mortality, this is to say exile from Eden to prohibit them from the Tree of Life.  (Having taken from the Tree of Knowledge: Of Good and Evil, to be able to live forever by taking from the Tree of life between that gap of Sin may be tantamount to hell); 2) The condition of humanity focused on evil continually, Genesis 6 - God opts to unleash His act of anti-creation, spare Noah and his household; 3) Shortly after that, when humanity engages in an elitist endeavor to reach the heavens through their crude architecture, ie. the Tower of Babel, confounding of speech averts some cosmic disaster that is unrecorded, precisely because of this intervention.  

So what makes sense, is to read the Bible in search of God's actions through biblical historiography because it is likely that His actions, continual interventions or, His mission as we will call it, is ongoing, and we may find patterns there that may help us discern the features of what is truly His mission.  What is God's mission?  Before we ask ourselves the question:  "If God is so good how come there is so much evil?"  Let us ask ourselves,  "Where and how is God working?"

To revisit the assumptions from one of the fundamental courses at Fuller (if they have not been revised in five years...)

1.       God is foremost interested in the relational redemption and reconciliation of His children, and the Bible is primarily an account of God’s missionary effort to reach all of humanity. (See John Stott’s article in the reader – “The Living God is a Missionary God”)

2.       Mission is the People of God heralding God’s reconciliation with humanity and God’s healing of interpersonal relationships in the present and coming Kingdom of God, and often involves the intentional crossing of barriers.

3.       The motivations, means, goals, scope, and meaning of mission derives from the heart of God, the missio Dei, God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, through the working of God’s Spirit through the Church and in the world.

4.       The Church’s reason for being, and the source of her constant renewal, is found in her participation in God’s universal mission in the world.

5.       The mission of the Church today is the continuation of the participation of the People of God in God’s mission which has its origins in the nature of God, takes early shape in the Old Testament, and is given fullest expression in the New Testament.

6.       The unity of the world Church is intimately connected with the mission of the Church in the world.

7.       The Church today is in great need of new, clear, and contextualized theologies of mission which will build upon but also reform the colonial, Western, and triumphalistic patterns of 19th – and early 20th-Century mission.

8.       The future strength of the Church lies in the congregations and denominations which intentionally foster ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and economic diversity within their faith communities and consciously open themselves to the evangelization and incorporation of new converts.

9.       The world is ever more a stew-pot of pluralistic society where people of very diverse cultures, religions, and world-views work and live side-by side.

10.    The greater the socio-cultural barrier to communicating the Gospel, the greater must be the intentionality, energy, cost, and administrative creativity in crossing the barrier.

11.    Everywhere in the world the local body of believers is the primary agent and locus for crossing cultural barriers and experiencing reconciliation in Christ.  

It is a good point in my ministry career to stop and look behind because it has been five years since I graduated from Fuller, and I have to be reminded why I am here and where I might be going in the next five.  As a very wise man once said:

Now all has been heard;
   here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
   for this is the duty of all mankind
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
   including every hidden thing,
   whether it is good or evil.