Throughout this past week we have been visiting all 70 participating schools under Simoshi’s Project Activity “Institutional Improved Cook Stoves for Schools and Institutions in Uganda”. We are making sure the institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) are in good conditions to start preparing the children’s daily meals.

Although schools have been closed for the past 7 months, many school kitchens were still operational and specially the IICS of smaller capacities were used daily to prepare the food for the school staff that reside within the premises.

We faced some bad surprises, as some IICS users were not the usual school cooks, they have not been trained on how to take care of their stoves, and the hygiene conditions were not what you would desire to find. So we had to get dirty, clean soot, collect mountains of ash and and scrap food stuck from inside the IICS. In some cases, have them repaired and re-plastered as the firewood logs had been using were too big a big and had damaged the combustion chambers.