In October of 2019 StoveTeam hosted 18 volunteers in Guatemala for a week of building and distributing clean cookstoves. The group included five kids under 18 years old, and one of them named Zaiya shared their experience with us!

My trip with the Stove Team was adventurous, to say the least.

When my mom first told me that we were volunteering with them in Guatemala, I got so excited that I almost jumped onto the table. When we actually arrived in Antigua, my expectations were blown out of the water.

Zaiya and family pose for a photo with the recipient of a stove they are helping to deliver.

The team was made up of a diverse group of people, all with different backgrounds and reasons they were there. There were kids my age and even from my school, but there were people I had never seen before, and I found new friends among them. Not just the volunteers but the staff and facilitators were very welcoming, and working by them was a real joy.

Zaiya learning to build an Ecocina cookstove with factory partner EcoComal’s Juan Carlos.

I had been to Guatemala once 3 years before, also for volunteer work, but I never spent much time in Antigua. But, as I spent more time in the city, whether it was working with the locals and making and delivering stoves, or making afternoon trips to the markets, I began to appreciate the country and foreign places as a whole more; it really is eye-opening to have an experience like that. And the work was not only hard, it was enjoyable. At one point, my job was to soak brick pieces into water to solidify them, but it got hard to lift them out so I ended up jumping into the pool during a rainy storm.

A family on their way home with their new stove.

The group switched jobs frequently, and it wasn’t grueling but fun, and in the end, we all knew it was worth it because of the cause we were doing it for. So yes, I did enjoy myself with the Stove Team trip very much, and I’m sure anyone else would if they chose to.

-Zaiya Garza