Urmila Yadav

(May 2010)

Urmila Yadav is 45 years old and has two children, one son (10th class) and one daughter (7th class). Her husband left her several years ago. She heard that he now lives in India where he has married another woman and started a new family.

Urmila lives with her parents and children in a clay-bamboo house. She earns her living from a small canteen and from the produce of some fields which neighbours let her work. She has to give 50% of her harvest as payment for the fields.

Urmila and her family live on the margin of subsistence. Often they simply don't have enough to eat and they seldom have a well balanced diet. Despite this she is determined to do everything to ensure her children can complete their schooling to have a good start in life.

She completed her training for manufacture of smokefree stoves in March 2010. To this end she travelled for the first time in her life to Kathmandu and could bring many impressions of life there back to her village. Still she is happy to be back in the known surroundings of her home village.

She was the only women in her training class. She was active, keen to learn and with her good sense of what is practical she quickly became the „Mother of the Stove Manufacturers“. She shows her certificate with pride throughout her village.

First of all Urmila built a smokefree stove in her canteen and invited her neighbours to see her "Chulo". Happily she made the first pot of tea on her new stove..

Urmila found a pottery nearby which could make the chimneys and their covers. She bargained with a steel salesman, to get the required iron. It took here a full day to form the iron parts for her first stove. She needed three metal sawblades and by the end of the day her hands were covered in painful blisters.

In the meantime 15 households have placed orders with Urmila. By April she had completed all the required clay bricks and tiles and installed the stoves in local cottages. It still takes her four hours to build one stove but that will decrease as she gains experience. She receives 300 Rs (ca. 3 Euro) per stove and she is saving with a view to sending her son to college next year - he wants to become a teacher.

Urmila has a bike for the journeys between villages and can often be seen cycling between the fields. Soon she'll be known throughout Saptari as „chulo banauane manchhe“ (stove manufacturer), and will not be able to save herself from the mountains of orders for smokefree stoves.