Why You Don’t Touch the Stove Pipe

So…ever since my family has been using the stove to cook and as a source of heat they have been telling me, “Don’t touch the stove pipe” or in Darija, “ma tqini sh l-canon sxxun”. Everytime they tell me this my first thought is: “Duh, I’m not stupid enough to touch the really hot metal stove pipe.” Well…I may have known not to touch it, but I still ended up grabbing it. Once day there were many women over, family I believe, and I had left the room to put my eating utensils on the kitchen counter. Upon re-entering the room I managed to trip and lose my balance, so instead of falling face first onto one of the women or the floor I decided to grab the nearest thing to me. You guessed it, the stove pipe. And the Moroccans were right, it was very very hot and you should never touch it. Lucky me I only managed to burn my ring finger on the lower half and not my whole hand. So, like a good little pcv I called the pcmo. That was fun. I should mention there is not a very good signal in our large mud house. So I had to run up to the roof and stay calm and comprehensible while my burn throbbed as I spoke with the pcmo for several minutes. It felt like agony at the time as all I wanted to do was run the burn under cold water. Turns out I didn’t really need to call the pcmo, I was certified in first aid back home, but at the time the burn seemed worse than it really was. I would almost call it a 2nd degree burn, I actually melted part of my skin and have a nice blister on it now. At least it doesn’t hurt anymore and it’s healing. So the moral of the story is this is why you shouldn’t touch the stove pipe, even if it does happen to be closer to than the wall as you are falling over people.