[Stoves] Roadside cooking in Somalia

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Friends

This is a story like none I have heard before.

Regards
Crispin

John Stover


"As a newly minted American Foreign Service Officer in 1979 my first posting was to Muqdishu, Soomaliya. They didn't have an agreed upon written language until 1960 so foreigners never had any reasonable way to learn the language until years later. As the junior officer in the Embassy I was the designated dogsbody for most of the trash tasks. I was asked by the Agency for International Development Director to find out why Somalia had fewer miles of paved roads in 1979 than they did at independence in 1960. Talking to the usual Somali diplomatic cocktail party goers turned up no useful information so I violated the common diplomatic practice and actually left the city and visited and talked to village people. Answer was simple. When camel dung supply was low the wife lucky enough to live by a paved asphalt road went out and dug out pieces to burn in their earthen stoves. (Hard to light but long burning) Younger kids were sent further down the roads to bring back ever more pieces. By the '80s the roads were mostly trashed...[snip]"
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20191019/cacd0f82/attachment.html>