How to start a fire, in 1 simple step

Here in Doro, we use aviation fuel to start our cooking fires. 

A few years back, there was a plane crash on the runway.  It had rained recently and the south end of the airstrip was still a little soft.  The plane was not quite off the ground when the wheels hit the soft ground, slowing it down enough that the Caravan was unable to clear the trees.  Everyone was injured, but the only fatality was the airplane itself. 

Later on, when the wreck was being cleared away, Sandy (who had been a passenger) asked about the fuel from the plane, which could not be re-used as aviation fuel.  An agreement was worked out, and the fuel was syphoned out of the plane and back into fuel drums.  Since then, the fuel has been used by folks on the SIM compound to start cooking fires.

I don't know how many drums there were to start with, but we are now down to less than 1/2 a drum of fuel, which has caused people to start asking what we are going to do about starting our fires when it runs out. 

We at the water project have found a (short-term) solution - keep using aviation fuel!  You see, AIM-AIR brings in full drums every now and then so that they can refuel when they land on our airstrip.  The empty barrels get rolled over to the compound to sit around until another use is found for them. 

We are using them as structures in which to make biosand filters.  (Stephen will give you more on that later.)  To make the filters, we have to first cut away a part of the lid and clean them thoroughly.  I called them empty barrels, but that is not entirely true - they all contain just a little bit of fuel, which we can dump out and pour into our little plastic bottles to keep lighting fires with. 

Most of the drums contain very little, maybe 150 mL or so.  Certainly no more than 300.  Others, however, contain a few bottles worth.  Yesterday, when we were emptying the drums, you could hear distinct sloshing in 3 of them.  1 still has a quasi-reasonable amount (less than 1/4 full still) which we will likely return to the compound for everyone's use.  The other two clearly contained some mixture of water and fuel, as there were two distinct layers of liquid when we emptied them into a basin.  We were all pretty sure that the fuel would float on top of the water, so we started carefully pouring that into the bottles, but then became very unsure of ourselves, as no-one actually knew the density of aviation fuel. 

That was time, of course, for a make-shift science experiment.  (Hooray science!)  We poured some water into an empty bottle, then poured a small amount of the top layer from the basin in.  Sure enough, we soon had a small layer floating on our known water in the bottle.  Had it been water, it would have mixed and we would not have seen any separation.  But it showed us that the small amount we poured in was of a lighter density than water, therefore a different substance, therefore the aviation fuel, and therefore the top layer in the basin was, as suspected, the fuel.  Hooray science again!

And now we have a few hundred more milliliters of aviation fuel to start our cooking fires with.  That's just what we do here in Doro.