How to turn on an oven in Chiapas

By Julia Kastner, KF9

This past week, I went to visit my first loan with Fundación Realidad A.C. in Mexico. I spent the week with Fundación Realidad’s branch office in Copainalá, Chiapas, but the loan was located at the tip of a mountain in a sunny town called Coapilla. Fundación Realidad makes group loans, so there were five women receiving loans that day. One of them, Maria Luisa Morales Perez, offered to take the profile picture around her wood-burning oven, and also offered to let me film her lighting it. She is using her loan to help pay for wood for the oven and ingredients for her bread. According to my flip camera, it took her a full 2 minutes just to turn on her oven! Her goal, if business goes well, is to get a better oven someday.

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