February, 2016—For many years, when Aura-Rios wasn’t cooking meals for her family over a smoky open fire in her Nicaraguan home, she and her daughter were preparing meals for area farmers over even larger fires.
Living day after day in a smoky haze, with little or no ventilation, took its tool on Aura’s health. And her daughter died from complications from a lung infection a few months ago.
Like most others in the region, and millions of others around the world, Aura had no safer option for preparing meals for her family, despite a doctor’s warning that the smoke was killing her.
“I didn’t have anything like a proper chimney or pipes like I have with the new stove, so all the smoke stayed inside the kitchen, and I was breathing all that in all the time,” she says.
“One day I just started coughing and coughing and had a really bad pain in my back and in my chest. I couldn’t stop coughing, so I decided to go to the doctor. He told me that the smoke was causing my sickness, and that my condition was becoming permanent.”
But since receiving her Clean Cookstove, Aura has already seen a difference in her home and her health.
Read Gloria’s story about how receiving a Clean Cookstove has impacted her life
“It’s really wonderful there’s no smoke in my kitchen . . . I used to cook in that area!” she says, pointing to a charred corner of the cement floor in her small kitchen, where the wooden beams and tiles above are also blackened.
The support of generous Canadians like you provides families with Clean Cookstoves, creating healthier homes and a brighter future. You can provide more families with this simple, life-saving technology through your donations and prayers.
And when you do, we have an opportunity to tell these families why they are being helped: “the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16, NKJV).
Your donation of $200 can help someone like Aura get a Clean Cookstove and have a healthier future. You can also donate a portion of that amount and help pay for a stove.
Build healthy families and thriving communities through education on hand-washing, nutrition, and other fundamentals or providing innovative solutions such as Clean Cookstoves that drastically improve health and open doors to share the Gospel.