18 Jul 2026 A clear calling

By Tammy Keith

A small, 11-year-old Guatemalan boy stood up to thank Bonnie Laycock of Conway and her team for building their family a stove, crying so hard he could barely speak.

“He was gulping for air and talking in Spanish, and he was saying he was so grateful because now his family wouldn’t have to breathe all that smoke and his mother wouldn’t be so sick. And he just wanted to say thank you so much for their new stove and how it’s going to make life so much better for them. And of course, we’re listening, all just crying, too,” Laycock said.

The 75-year-old has led 31 mission trips to build stoves for the Mayan people in Guatemala with the United Methodist Church (UMC), including four with her church, First UMC in Conway. Stove Builders of Guatemala is a part of the national organization, although any denomination is welcome to go.

Laycock is the reason the national project started. “I’m reluctant to say that because I’ve always told people it was just God’s vision, and he used me to do it. I was just following where I was being led,” she said.

The project started in 2011 when she and her husband, Steve, lived in Wichita, Kansas, where she was director of missions for the UMC before moving to Conway nine years ago. “It was just a project of the Methodist church I was part of — me going down there with a couple of teams, learning Spanish and realizing, ‘Hey, they need help; they could use a stove,’” she said.

The United Methodist Church has built 3,000 stoves since then. 

Service is practically in Laycock’s DNA. She grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, watching her mother do mission work through the UMC. “I wanted to go down to the poor sections of Cincinnati and work somehow down there. So, I look back, and I think I was just born with this desire,” she said.

She started going on mission trips within the United States in the early 1970s with Steve. She’s been on mission trips to 33 developing countries since then.

“But before this thing about Guatemala came up, I saw there was a United Methodist missionary couple just outside Mexico City that was having a dedication ceremony for a program they had developed,” called appropriate technology for Third World countries. “They had figured out all these different ways that the poor in Mexico could help themselves if somebody in their village was just taught how to do different things,” she said.

One was a stove that vented smoke out of people’s tiny homes and used far less firewood than cooking on the ground over an open fire. Laycock said lung disease kills more women in Guatemala than anything else.

She went to the dedication in Mexico and was impressed, so she took a church team back to Mexico to learn about building the stoves.

“You’re changing their lives forever, because they know that they’re going to be so much healthier because they have been cooking on a bonfire in their house on the floor, which is mostly dirt with no windows in a tiny room. And I’ve stepped into some of those houses; they keep fires going all day long because they’re usually cooking all day long, and there is so much smoke I can’t even go in there,” she said.

The mission teams find young men in the villages who become the expert stove builders, so they can continue to teach villagers after Laycock and the teams leave. The Guatemalan families contribute ^$20 of the ^$100 cost to build the stoves. They also do hands-on work, such as packing the dirt inside the stacked fire brick. 

Guatemalan families “react the same every single time. Because, first of all, they cannot believe that as Americans who don’t know them, and most people that go down had never been to Guatemala before, why would you even come and help us, is what they’re thinking,” she said.

When a stove is finished, they pray. “We call it blessing the stove, and everybody puts their hands on the stove, the family members and the team members that built it,” she said. “On our last trip, we had Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal. They [Guatemalans] love it; I love that, too, because it shows them that, hey, we’re all in this together, you know. We all worship the same God.”

Sarah Coker of Conway, who was on Laycock’s stove-building team, said when she thinks of her friend, she thinks of the hymn “Here I Am, Lord.” “In it, we sing, ‘I will go, Lord, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.’

“Bonnie responds to this call wholeheartedly, in every sense of the word. She leads because she loves to do so, and she loves the people she serves, her neighbors and children of God. She does all this with humor and common sense. What a blessing she is to all of us.”

Laycock said she decided when she led a team to Guatemala in March that it might be her last.

“I have felt like, OK, it’s time for me to move on. Well, I’ve learned never to say never,” she said, laughing.

“I learned over the years [that] everywhere in this world needs help. But the big difference with stove builders is that we’re teaching them to help themselves, and as long as we can keep sending money down, they’re building stoves when we’re not there,” she said. “As much as it changes their lives, there isn’t a person who comes back to the United States who hasn’t said, ‘It’s changed my life more than it has ever changed theirs.’ You get to know them, and you’re in their homes.”

Because they’re not just building stoves; they’re building relationships.