The defining moment was when I was working El Salvador with Peace Corps workers and my high school students. I visited the home of a friend who was a Peace Corps Volunteer. She had her own connecting room, but she had a host mom and a host family with whom she lived and ate and socialized.

One day, while staying there, I was invited into the kitchen with the host mom to see how she made tortillas. I'll never forget what I saw. I was in a closed room with no ventilation. There was no chimney. And there was a fire on which a flat plate sat that allowed her to take the beaten corn meal and lay it in flattened pieces to cook. The walls were filled with blackness, pure soot. And she coughed a great deal as she cooked. In fact, I first realized the quality I had heard previously in her voice. It was phlegm. It was scratchiness. It was a low dark husky quality as if she had been a smoker for many years even though she had never smoked. And this woman, the matriarch of the family, had some type of respiratory condition that had never been diagnosed.
She wasn't the only one. Many women in the town were in the same condition. And many of their kids were in the same condition. It shocked me. Adding a chimney to the building seemed like an easy thing to do, a simple incremental project.
One of the next times, I returned to El Salvador we were building better and portable cook stoves with and alongside the people of the village and instructing them in their use. I knew something had to be done and I wanted to be part of the solution. What I didn't know was how big the problem was, that the problem was as big in countries in Asia like India or that it was also found in Africa. I realized then, that we had a lot of work to do.