A blurred view of a bright future

March, 2018;

I couldn't sleep.  My mind was racing, even in the semi-conscious state of near-sleep in the early hours of the morning. Excitement, nervousness, anticipation, hope,  so I turned on the lamp and reached for my notepad

Late last evening, I delivered my friends Karen and Yoram to their hotel, crashed in a rented room at 0130, finally turned out the lights at 0215 and my eyes sprang open at 0530.

Today could be the beginning of something wonderful. It has already been wonderful; a parallel world that I dropped into in June 2009, going on 9 years now. This trans-formative experience was brought to me by the late Barbara Latenser, a remarkable burn surgeon whose friendship I was blessed to acquire through the American Burn Association and its international outreach efforts. If my dream comes true, Yoram and Karen will return to Lusaka, Zambia having signed a MOU for the distribution of institutional high efficiency wood-fired cookstoves and medical autoclaves though the Churches Health Association of Zambia (CHAZ).

It will be a lifeline for InStove, the little aspirational NGO with which I have been associated since the beginning of 2013. It will be an opportunity for CHAZ to acquire a revenue producing activity that contributes to stability in funding unrelated to dependence on international aid. It will be an opportunity for countless health care institutions including hospitals and rural health clinics to reliably run their surgical and obstetrical services in places where an unreliable electrical grid and the  need to purchase diesel fuel to run a generator to produce electricity threaten the ability to sterilize surgical tools. It will represent a major step forward in my personal dream of seeing mission hospitals in Zambia to become champions for the use of improved cookstoves in the communities they serve. It could lead to improved personal and public health, improved local and regional environmental akafaaf

I awoke thinking of Harriet. I met her in August 2011. She is now 10 years old. She had been in horrible pain for a month when I met her. In her small village, a day's walk/bus trip from St. Francis Hospital in Katete, Eastern Province, Zambia;  her curiosity and desire to help her mother with the task of preparing the family's nshima (a form of corn grits) caused her to suffer scald burns to both of her hands. In the hospital one month later, the back of her hands was a sea of bloody granulation tissue. Finger bones were exposed, as well as open joints of fingers on both hands.  The right thing to do was to shorten many fingers and use living tissue and skin from the palmar side of her fingers to cover and preserve one functional joint on each finger.  Harriot's mother, barely 19 years of age herself, borrowed a cell phone and called her village to talk with the child's father. He refused to provide consent for shortening fingers, so we operated to place skin grafts and make her large wounds into very small wound, knowing full well that she would develop severely deformed fingers and be highly disabled for life.

Harriet's injury was preventable, as are most burns of that nature, by adoption of a method of cooking safer than a pot perched precariously over a bonfire. For every disabling burn, 100 or more  Zambian women are relentlessly damaging their health and that of their young children by chronically breathing the smoke from cooking fires.

One does not need to discover new scientific truths, develop magical new electronic devices, move from the reality of poverty to the fantasy-land of virtual reality. Simple tools built from common materials and plenty of footwork on the ground in rural parts of Africa will suffice to change the face of the future for millions of families across a continent.

We live in the present, informed by the past, but without an ability to clearly see into the future. So we endow that unfocused view with our hopes and dreams. Big dreams start with small steps. We have taken small steps, and are now about to take the first of some bigger steps. They are steps of hope, steps of faith, but grounded in the conviction that the work already done has proven the case, the relationships we have to work with are solid, with partners of integrity, already vetted through their demonstrated commitment to the welfare of their country and a long history of toil to that end.

Later this morning we met with our Zambian guests and transported them to InStoves workshop, where we showed them all the steps in producing an institutional cookstove. Our two founders, our talented young graduate school engineer, soon to finish his masters degree after studying the factors that contribute to the user experience in adapting to a new method of cooking using a high efficiency wood fired cookstoves.  Yoram and Karen picked up parts and examined them, compared parts to complete stoves, asked questions and concluded that our methods are quite compatible with their understanding of Zambian industrial capacity. Karen was particularly impressed with the humble nature of our operations, reflecting that a prime organizational value of CHAZ is a humble heart.

We convened at InStove headquarters over hot tea and began exploring one another's motivation for seeking a conversation about partnership. We discovered an amazing alignment of mission and vision for making a measurable improvement in the lives of others, a growing confidence that our shared vision could be well supported by the products we produce that have already been placed with end-users. We explored the models of collaboration with which each organization has experience and learned that neither organization is skilled or experienced in testing and developing a market based model of technology transfer. We finished our morning session with a sense of alignment of mission and vision, but many questions about how one takes vision and converts it to policy, partnership and business practice.

We moved on to a simple soup and bread lunch, where a lively conversation over Zambian civil society, tribal life, geopolitical influence and view of progress and cultural change occurred. The conversation and laughter flowed. We then returned to Colgan's island and the warm conference room to complete the days deliberation. Yoram wrapped up the day with a summation of the opportunity, the needs of each partner and expressed a conviction about making a mutually persistent effort at finding  our way.  Specific methods and waypoints along the path to a full industrial scale partnership.
What a day of hope and inspiration! I pray that God's hand will be on us all as we seek ways to forward this work in spite of obstacles of time, money and forces of chaos arrayed against us in this world.