Grace Chew’s Blog

22/2/2009: Day 11, Kapuna Hospital

Sunday again, and a super-long service in the
morning, lasting from 915am to 1pm. Perhaps it
was a special service because of the joy of the
graduation ceremony and the special guests who
were here, but we had a lot of song presentations
from various groups. We also heard more amazing
stories from Rita, a CHW who’d spent 6 months in
Australia attending and working for several
churches and NGOs, and broadening her horizons a bit.

However long Sunday worship seemed though, our
time spent over the stove today was longer! And
it’s probably the only day we haven’t gone to the
hospital for any medical-related work. What
started as an attempt for a small fire for lunch
and rice for dinner became a struggle to keep the
fire big enough for lunch, and enough rice to
make pineapple rice for dinner for 8 people!
Thankfully we’d experimented with cooking fires
before and have a good routine now – I’m usually
the one manning the fire, making sure it burns
properly and doesn’t die out, and Ruth rules the
pots and pans and churns out delicious food. Our
lunch of porridge with sweet potato (called kao
kao here and much sweeter than sweet potatoes
back home!) turned out fine as it was the first
thing we cooked on my merrily burning fire. Then
we tried cooking rice. We’d already been educated
about the perils of cooking rice on a stove (the
first time I cooked rice on a stove was in
Crawley and ended burning it, and the first time
I cooked rice here I made porridge instead) so I
left it up to Ruth, and almost got it correct! I
say almost because it was rice, just a bit more
gunky than usual, like when you’ve put too much
water with the rice in the rice cooker. All that
rice cooking took 3 ½ hours, with me continually
checking and stoking the fire! We took a break
when one of the Uncle Johns from the treehouse
came over for a talk about missionaries and
colonialism, and let the fire burn out a bit, but
since Dr. Valerie came over soon after to check
on dinner, we got her to restart the fire. She
was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the
embers in our fire, surprised enough to award us
brownie points for being the only medical
students to try and successfully light stove fires!

The next 1 ½ hours was spent cooking up the
pineapple rice, pork omelet and vegetables, the
last 45 minutes or so in semi-darkness, so much
so I had to train Ruth’s headlight on the eggs so
that she could see to cook them! It was a good
meal (even if the pineapple rice was more like
sticky rice with pineapple, beans and carrots),
all from our hard work, and the sense of
satisfaction from cooking up a storm on a
woodfire stove is quite a nice feeling to have.

All this starting of fires has led to several
observations – you’ve got to get everything ready
on the stove and around you, so that you only
have to strike one match to get a fire going, and
are prepared to feed the fire appropriate fuel.
There’s a progression of fuel to feed the fire
too, from fast-burning palm leaves to the trusty
coconut husk to the solid wood planks. You’ve got
to pick your fuel wisely, in order to get a
long-burning fire that won’t go out easily. It’s
all very well and good to get a lively
red-burning fire with palm leaves and twigs, but
their flames are short-lived and unless you
graduate to more substantial fuel, you’ll be left
with ashes and the need to strike another match.
Best for fires are the coconut husks which will
always produce embers once burnt, and blocks of
wood which burn merrily then become glowing red
embers which help set fire to the next block of
wood. And sometimes you need to blow out the
solitary flame you have going in order to bring
the embers alive and start flaming again. It’s
enough to get me philosophical, but I’ll leave
you to decide what principles of fire-starting are transferable to life! heh