How it all began

Nancy Sanford Hughes was working as a volunteer in the kitchen with the Cascade Medical Team in Solola, Guatemala in the spring of 2004. One evening, a patient came into the kitchen of the public hospital where she was working and asked to delay the meal so she could say a few words to the team.

This beautiful, eighteen-year-old indigenous woman had fallen onto a kitchen fire at age two and lost the use of her hands. For sixteen years she had prayed to use her hands. She told the doctors that they were the answer to her prayers. It was at that point when Nancy thought, "We need to do something to prevent burns rather than treat them."

When she returned to Eugene, Oregon, she asked her Rotary club, the Southtowne Rotary Club, about sponsoring a grant to provide safer, fuel-efficient stoves to the people in Central America. They encouraged her to write the grant proposal, and she not only wrote that grant but went on to apply for grants from Carlos Santana’s Milagro Foundation and Synchronicity Foundation.

Those initial stove building projects of the Southtowne Rotary club became its own organization… StoveTeam International, an organization that addresses preventable problems caused by smoky open fires in rural homes. These problems include debilitating upper respiratory, eye and skin diseases, tragic burns and untreated hernias caused by carrying heavy loads of firewood.

Factories building the Ecocina stove use local labor and materials, thus boosting the local economy. And the efficiency of the Ecocina stove helps reduce the ecological problems associated with deforestation.

StoveTeam's work has been featured in Rotary publications and Nancy Hughes received Rotary's prestigious "Service Above Self" award for her dedication, drive and non-stop effort towards solving this age-old problem.