February, 2016—Gloria could see the writing on the wall.
Her kitchen walls, laden with a thick layer of black soot, were a reminder that her lungs were also being damaged by decades of cooking over open fires without any kind of proper ventilation.
Gloria lives with her 22-year-old daughter in the Nicaraguan municipality of Leon, about 140 km from Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Like most others in this area, they are plagued with health issues because of poor indoor air quality.
It’s most often women and children who suffer the consequences of heavy, dangerous smoke.
Gloria, her daughter and her grandchildren—who are often in her home when she is cooking—have all struggled with respiratory issues including asthma-like symptoms and lung infections.
She points to the corner of her small, cement-walled kitchen. While her old stove is gone, the damage it caused her home and health is imprinted on the walls and ceiling.
Thankfully, because of generous Canadian donors like you, there is new hope for Gloria and other struggling families. She no longer has to cook over a dangerous open fire, thanks to an innovative new stove from Samaritan’s Purse.
This simple one-piece concrete stove—known as a Clean Cookstove—protects the lungs of Gloria and her family by sending all the deadly smoke safely up a chimney pipe.
“Look at my wall, and ceiling, everything is black [where her open fire used to burn]. Where my new stove is the wall is clean, and I feel better,” she says.
Aura-Rios has already seen a difference in her home and her health. Click here to read her story.
Indoor black carbon air pollution causes about 4.3 million deaths worldwide every year, which is more than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Most of the deaths happen in developing nations like Nicaragua, where people often don’t have electricity or the means to afford safer cooking methods.
Watching her neighbor become seriously ill with respiratory disease was a frightening wake-up call, Gloria says.
“As I’m getting older, I didn’t know what kind of issues were developing from the smoke I’ve been breathing in all these years,” she says. “My neighbor is better now because she got one of these stoves. I was so happy to hear that.”
Your donation of $200 can help someone like Gloria get a Clean Cookstove and have a healthier future. You can also donate a portion of that amount and help pay for a stove.
Build healthy families and thriving communities through education on hand-washing, nutrition, and other fundamentals or providing innovative solutions such as Clean Cookstoves that drastically improve health and open doors to share the Gospel.