SLOWest Coffeehouse: People for Guatemala Stove Project

One corner of the audience at the reading. (photo by Brian Pirie)
The Saturday night reading had a good turnout of around 20 which filled the back corner of Bridgehead at 1277 Wellington, with a few snagged from the coffee shop who were leaning and listening in at the side, now and then, a group of 3 who stayed and watched for a while. The warm room was comfortable and relaxed as people settled in for poetry and a good cause.
The evening was a fundraiser for the Guatemala Stove Project and funds, it raised. We made enough for most of another stove from book sales and a pass of the hat that the group generously tipped to the GSP. More about that further down…

Tom gave some news on SLOWest, including that the monthly coffeehouse part of their group is having its final evening with us after 2 years of bringing musicians, artists, a choir and poets.
They’ll continue other sustainability/community building activities, including The Great River Project April 19th with Ottawa Riverkeeper Meredith Brown who did a summer-long expedition that traveled 900 kilometres of the 1,271 kilometers of the Ottawa River, a Community garden gathering May 3rd, a guided cycling tour of solar panel installations on May 12th. There was also a passing of a thank you card to the evening manager of Bridgehead for accommodating the group for the years it ran.
Karen Second gave a few minutes description of what she saw and experienced while seeing Stoves being installed in Guatemala and the happiness and pride of a Maya woman setting up the stove in her home. The freelance writer has an article coming up in Fifty-Five-Plus Magazine. Watch for a feature on Tom Clarke who started the Guatemala Stove Project in the May issue. He has pressed onwards with its Perth branch, and saw it develop an Ottawa branch as well.
I pointed out the photos of the first two families that got stoves from sales of poetry and the poetry on the table, including Czandra’s chapbook, In Air/Air Out which people can also get at Collected Works. Monty Reid donated sales of copies of his Contributor Notes chapbook to GSP and Jorge Etcheverry donated the evening’s sales of his Cronipoemas, Antologia di Poeti Americani: Anaconda and an anthology of poets including Mayakovsky.

The reading evening started with some poetry by Montreal-area’s Czandra who played in sound and interstitials spaces who then read a tan renga with Grant Savage. Shai Ben-Shalom put on his poet hat (literally, although those photo turned out blurry) and brought us some witty poems of cats and men and the holy grounds of the body.

Over break John DeMers who came to listen was volunteered to get his guitar from his car and play us some musical interludes during breaktime. People from various directions of community got a chance to chat before we came back with coffee or treats and heard some excerpts from In Air/Air Out. Poems in there of rob mclennan, Kevin Spenst and Danielle Susi were read by Marilyn Irwin.


Jorge Etcheverry read from some work in English and then to give a taste of the language, he read a poem of his in Spanish as well. So much of language is intonation and in the body. We forget that when we only listen to English when we think we can understand every word.
Following him, Monty Reid read from Flat Land, a series of poems from La Gunilla, Mexico where he was working on development projects, watching the people move stone with homemade shovels, “the women/who built the road, who left their flesh in the ditches, who/insisted then that to walk is to remember”. He recounted watching kids at an orphanage play baseball where it was a kind of colloborative agreement on what all the plays were. “Every pitch is invented. There is no equipment, no ump, no one keeps/ the stats. Here everybody hits.”
In Guatemala, it’s a similar scene. The sixty percent of Guatemalans who are members of indigenous Mayan groups own only six percent of the land. Most live on less than $2 a day. Basic resources, such as health care, electricity and potable water are extremely scarce in the highlands, where the majority of the Maya live. The Guatemala Stove Project was started by Tom Clarke in 1999 to address some of the gap.
The stoves burn wood more efficiently than open fires, freeing time for looking for wood and/or freeing money towards other uses. They make a safe cooking surface with kids running around. Each stove, costing $225 Canadian, increases life expectancy of the women who cooks by 15 years, allowing the (average) family of five to get more healthy hands continuing to work without breathing smoke and without living in creosote covered walls.
As a sort of sweat-equity in the project those receiving stoves are trained and assisted as masons and are given materials to add these cinderblock stove and chimney to their homes. A simple step but it leverages the communities and lives forward. Since 1999, the group has enabled about 4000 stoves to be built or, in another measure, about 20,000 lives directly effected for the better. Worldwide, 3-stone fires are still used, but with big issues, the only route to go is one person at a time.
This project of In Air/Air Out chapbooks, thanks to the reading on the weekend and SLOWest passing the hat and giving all their donations to the Guatemala Stove Project, book sales of the evening donated to the cause by Jorge Etcheverry and Monty Reid, the sale of chapbooks, and a couple donors who topped up the total, we have now tipped the 3rd stove enabled thru poetry!

Here’s the whole group who were part of that last reading at SLOWest Coffeehouse — those who were the planned readers, organizers of SLOWest, and people who, by coming, got roped into either reading or playing music.
(Back row, L-R) Monty Reid, Jorge Etcheverry, John DeMers, Shai Ben-Shalom, Grant Savage, Tom Lips
(Front Row, L-R) Czanda, Pearl Pirie, Marilyn Irwin and Donna Colterman.