A team of seven UMW students and their professor recently spent a week in Honduras conducting extensive interviews with more than 50 families suffering from indoor air pollution from wood-burning stoves--the fourth-leading cause of death for children under 5 in developing countries. Indoor air pollution has similar affects as smoking during pregnancy; it's as if children are smokers at birth.
Next up for the students: raising enough money to provide every home in the Honduran refugee village of Siete de Abril with improved cookstoves. The group also plans to establish a program for monitoring air quality in the homes after the new stoves are installed.
The project was partially funded by both a UMW Student Research Grant and a $1000 nationally competitive grant from The Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Partnership Foundation, awarded to projects that "represent the most innovative and promising ways to serve the community while applying what is learned in the classroom." It is a community effort involving the UMW Economics Department, student run non-profit Students Helping Honduras, the Honduran Association for Development and the families of Siete de Abril.
The students and their advisor, UMW Economics Professor Shawn Humphrey, along with two undergraduate researchers from UNITEC university in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, spent a week on site in the village, conducting in-depth interviews and doing assessments of the residents’ respiratory health. The class has since returned to Mary Washington and is actively looking for sponsors for the next phase of the project. The plan is to match a donor with each family in Siete de Abril. The stoves cost $83 each, and the Honduran Association for Development will provide training to the villagers in how to properly use the new stoves in their homes.
While the group was on site, they met and interviewed a family who had recently lost a child to asthma. It was a difficult interview that only reinforced just how important the stove project is. "They know the smoke is deadly," says UMW senior Ashley Lippolis, "but they haven't been able to do anything about it. We're giving them that chance."
