Clayton women spark clean air business in Guatemala

It’s hard to imagine that something as innocent as cooking meals could be deadly, but in Guatemala, 15 residents die every day in the country by cooking with wood fires. A “staggering” 9.6 million people are affected by Household Air Pollution (HAP), which is why Clayton resident Patricia Espinosa is strongly promoting her daughter Christina’s new business, GenteGas.

It’s not just parental pride. It can really save lives.

Christina, a University of the Pacific graduate, is now living in that Latin American country, trying to bring the idea of using liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to the masses through her new business.

“When I was studying at UOP, I applied to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGIU) conference,” Christina says. “There everyone has what is called a ‘commitment to action,’ which is focusing on resolving some global issue. I had read a bit on the health impacts of cooking with wood and thought that I would apply to CGIU with an idea to resolve the health impacts.”
Since she was studying Spanish in Guatemala, she decided to focus her efforts there. But as she did some research, she says she felt the solutions she was looking at weren’t going to make a big enough impact in the health of residents.

“I was really bothered by that and it felt shameful to promote something that didn’t have a strong enough impact,” she says. “One day I was sitting with my mentor, Charley Ansbach, and we just started talking about how designing and trying to make a stove and fuel for ‘the poor’ was a little frustrating and that if we wanted to really save lives then how come we weren’t converting more people to gas?”

From that day on she began to study how much of an impact converting to LPG would have, and found that more than 90 percent of the people she surveyed would want to convert to gas.
“Very few initiatives existed on a global scale to help people switch from cooking with wood to gas. So that’s basically how we got started … talking to the people and figuring out how to make it work.”

It seems like a great idea. Cooking smoke is the fifth worst threat to public health in the developing world. Guatemala has the highest percentage of disease attributable to solid fuel use in Central America and wood fuel is used by 94 percent of rural households, Patricia Espinosa says.

GenteGas’ mission is to reduce the entry costs of clean burning gas stoves and fuels as well as provide income generating opportunities to women with the purpose of eradicating toxic smoke and the associated diseases and death, Christina says.

To help get the business off the ground, Christina in August started an Indiegogo crowd-sourcing campaign of $15,000 to help fund the business. Each “campaigner” designs a perk that donators can claim to support the campaign — and all perks are food related. Some include Guatemalan meals, cookbooks, and other food packages.

Christina, who has lived in Guatemala since 2010, says she is now devoted to bringing safe cooking and energy resources to her adopted country — as is Patricia, who travels down to Guatemala frequently to see her daughter and help with the new business.

“Guatemala is an easy place to fall in love with,” Christina says. “The country is beautiful and the people are welcoming. Surely a place everyone should visit.”

And feel safe, thanks to effort’s like Christina’s.

For more information on GenteGas’ crowd-sourcing campaign, visit http://igg.me/at/gentegas.