Our Partners in Doing Good

January 2026

Hands for Peacemaking (HfP) has become an invaluable partner for Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala and has already contributed significantly to improvements on our campus at Maya Jaguar Private Technical Institute. The recent water improvement project to increase rainwater catchment, filtration, and storage, was funded by a global grant from The Rotary Foundation and contributions by several Rotary districts and clubs. HfP local staff carried out that project and also installed some of their signature clean-air stoves to improve our campus cooking facility.

The campus dining hall, which serves 50-60 students, plus another 10-15 teachers and staff daily during the school year, only had two indoor wood-burning stoves. This indoor kitchen was unbearably hot and unhealthy for breathing. Another old stove located outside and some distance from the dining room was used to boil water for cooking and sanitation.

The Aller stoves were invented by an HfP volunteer and are fabricated locally at a small HfP facility: they are much more efficient, use 50% less wood than needed before, and save many student hours of firewood gathering. The smoke is vented away from the kitchen, making cooking and breathing in the kitchen much easier and healthier.

HfP replaced the two old kitchen stoves with the more efficient Aller stoves and also added three other stoves in an outdoor cooking area located just outside and downhill from the kitchen. Here the three cooks and students prepare masa, the traditional tortilla dough, boil beans in big pots, and boil water for other uses.

The Aller stoves are a true godsend for our campus and we are grateful to HfP and Rotary for the gifts of water and stoves!