Protect Guatemalan Forests with Clean Cookstoves

Last year, TRL's cook stove program took a step beyond the kitchen. The women who use our Q'aaq' improved stoves have long understood that using less firewood matters — but understanding something in your mind is different from feeling it in your body. So we took them into the forest.

Forest Walks for Women

Forest Walks for Women is one part of the environmental education that accompanies TRL's cook stove program. Each participant is a Q'aaq' stove owner — a woman who has already reduced her firewood consumption and who is ready to see, firsthand, what she is helping to protect.

The walks take place in the Rey Tepepul Reserve, a 2,000-hectare cloud forest on the slopes of Volcán Atitlán and one of the last refuges of the Resplendent Quetzal in this region. The afternoon before each walk, participants attend an educational session at TRL's office. The following morning, TRL's Tz'utujil eco-tourism guide leads them through the forest — identifying birds, explaining how trees collect moisture from the clouds, and bringing them to the area where the quetzals nest. Every group saw them.

In 2025, we completed nine walks and brought 53 women into the forest. Each one received a stainless-steel water bottle — a small, daily reminder that the choices we make at home reach further than our walls.

Why This Matters Here

The forests above Santiago Atitlán are disappearing. In 2005, Hurricane Stan triggered a lahar on deforested slopes that killed hundreds of people in this community. The link between tree cover and survival is not abstract here — it is living memory.

And yet most of the women who live at the foot of these mountains had never walked through them. During Guatemala's armed conflict, the forests became places of fear and violence, off-limits to women for years. Three decades after the peace, that absence had quietly become the norm. Forest Walks opens that door — and the resistance we encountered along the way only confirmed how necessary it is.

That 53 women went anyway — and that 32 returned voluntarily for a year-end gathering on a bitterly cold morning — tells us the program is reaching something real.

"Decía que el quetzal era algo que solo había visto en fotografías, pues creía que era imposible verlo en estas áreas." — Andrea, stove owner and forest walks participant

Looking Ahead

We are continuing the program in 2026, and with each walk, the community of women who know and protect this forest grows. Thank you for making that possible.