Building With Dirt

I just got back from Bamako, after attending the TERRA 2008 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EARTHEN ARCHITECTURE! It deserves all caps, because it was just that exciting. I met hundreds of people from all over the world who love building with dirt as much as I do! Who knew? And they all wanted to give me lots of money to build this school that I'm working on. So yay! It was all fantastic. We talked about different ways to build with dirt, different ways to preserve earthen structures, what additives to mix with earthen mortar, how to stabalize earthen structures with bamboo to resist earthquakes, and so many other fun topics! And it all happened right in my own back yard: Bamako!

So here's the update on the school project:

This is the condition of the current school:





The village is totally stoked about the idea, and I'm trying to keep them included in every step of the process. When I get back to site, I'm going to work for a day with the kids in the school to draw pictures of what they want the new building to look like. Then we're having a community meeting to look at the kids drawings, my interpretations of them, and get any other input that people feel strongly about.
We're leaning toward using compressed earth bricks, because the village wants concrete, which is expensive and not really available locally, over adobe bricks, so we settled in the middle with compressed earth bricks. I'm still looking for engineers to help with the water harvesting system.

As for the women's garden, things have started growing, and a few of the plots are doing great. We're having a little trouble with chickens getting in and eating everything, so the next step looks like we'll have to improve the fence, either by getting a metal fence, or planting really thorny bushes all around it.




All of the millet harvesting is finished, so the village is now busy with adobe brick production to fix up their houses before the rainy season:




I'm off to Senegal in a few days, to play softball, lay by the beach, and eat fish! I couldn't be more excited.

p.s. This is the inside of my house (since I've never posted a picture of it):
Cozy, huh?

And then I found five dollars....

I gotten a lot of requests to translate that last line, so here's the story that goes with it: I came into Segou for new years eve, and took a boat ride on the river to watch the sun set with some friends. While we were on the boat we saw some fireworks (Malians celebrate new years, too!). I tried to ask the word for fireworks in bambara: A be fo cogodi ni tasuma be sanfe? (translation: How is it called when fire is in the sky?). And the answer I got was "Tasuma be sanfe" (fire in the sky). This might be a 'had to be there' moment, but it says something about the literalness of the language that continually cracks me up.
Anyway, I'm back in Segou having finished another round of training. I'm really looking foreward to getting back to my village, as I now have several exciting project ideas that I need to go over with them. I've been talking to Engineers Without Boarders (another volunteer service organization) about collaborating on the construction of a real school building in my village (made out of more than sticks and leaves) that incorporates large scale rainwater harvesting for irrigation in the garden. Nothing is certain yet, but the project would take care of several of my village's biggest needs - education, access to water, and small scale income generation (i.e. selling the produce from the garden), so I'm working hard to make it happen.
I don't know when I got so busy! I'll be back in Bamako in a little over a week to attend a conference on Earthen Architecture, then I'm off to Senegal for the West African International Softball Tournament (WAIST). Lots of fun ahead.
Please keep me posted on how all of YOU are doing!

Tasuma be Sanfe de!

Sorry for the short christmas post, but, as promised, I can write more often now that I'm in Bamako for a few weeks, with all the luxuries of the modern world. We tried to watch the OSU game last night, huddled together under discarded refugee blankets at 1 in the morning, but it wouldn't stream fast enough from the internet, so we gave up. I heard they lost anyway. Tonight we're taking advantage of the CNN access here to watch the New Hampshire primaries. We'll take what we can get.
What brings me to Bamako, other than internet and CNN, is the second phase of technical training. In between football games and catching up with all the other volunteers, we're learning methods for digging wells, irrigating gardens, composting, etc., and also how to find funding for such projects.

I mentioned refugee blankets - yes, it's freezing here! I didn't take them seriously when they said that cold season was coming, but it's true! I'm wearing sweaters and sitting around fires to keep warm.

A be fo cogodi ni tasuma be sanfe?

All I got for Christmas was giardia

After Tabaski, I headed down to Bamako to spend Christmas with some friends. Warm weather and the pace of the big city snuffed out much of the holiday feel, but we celebrated christmas eve toasting wine and cheese cozily at our hotel. Even though Bamako offers 'real food' such as hamburgers and ice cream, we ate our Christmas dinner at an egg shack, and headed out to watch some live music. That's when it hit me. I spent the rest of christmas in the bathroom, humming carols.

Tabaski Sauce

(disclaimer - this post is not for the weak stomached!)
I survived my first Tabaski and am back in the city having JUST finished a 50K bike ride. (The internet cafe is air conditioned, so it's a good place to cool off!)
Tabaski started out much like Ramadan: everyone wore their best clothes and prayed together in a field (see previous picture), but after the prayer everyone rushed to the village center for a mass slaughtering of sheep. Since every family is required to kill a sheep (in memory of the sheep Abraham killed instead of his son), we're talking somewhere around 30 sheep, necks slit, in a pile, twitching on the ground. I'll spare you all the pictures. The rest of the day was spent cooking and eating. Everyone in the village also felt compelled to give me a pile of their meat, and by the end of the day I had amassed over 10 kilo's, piled into a bucket. Keep in mind that when I say meat I mean every part that once belonged to the animal: bones, stomaches, intestines, everything. Now some of these are actually quite good; the liver's tasty, as are the kidneys. But the stomach I just can't stomach. I ended up giving a lot of my loot away to other families. The meat fest was followed by a lot of dancing and drinking of tea, late into the night.
Now I'm getting ready for christmas in the city with other volunteers and, hopefully, with a little less meat.

"Cold Season"

Happy Thanksgiving! I just got back into town after spending Thanksgiving with some other volunteers. We actually managed to make a complete thanksgiving dinner, with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, fruit salad, even pumpkin pie! It was amazing. We bought 2 turkeys (alive) cut their necks (facing mecca, of course), took out feathers and organs, and cooked 'em up. And to think that I was once a vegetarian!




But it's back to work tomorrow. It's "cold season" which means there's a lot of work going on. By cold I mean sometimes it gets down to the 70's, at night. Yet people in my village are starting to walk around in hats and puffy coats!
Now is the time of year when everyone is harvesting crops, and here that consists mostly of millet. I've gone out to the fields a few times to help, but mostly I've been constructing structures to store the grain (cereal banks, I guess), made out of mud. They have a really neat method of stacking interlocking wet mud bricks into circular forms with a single window. It's pretty fast, and with 3 people you can get one up in about two days.





I'm also getting chickens next week to raise for the eggs (and for a steady source of protien)! So between the garden, the (free range) chickens, the lack of electricity, and riding my bike everywhere, my carbon impact is probably the lowest it's ever been. (Minus the bit of petrol I use in my lantern.) All the farming here is done without machines, too; it's picked by hand, carried on heads, and then transported by donkey cart.






That's pretty much the update. I feel like I've just about settled in, although there are still plenty of random events (like having a picnic in the middle of a millet field, gathered around a single bowl scooping up handfulls of toh and snot sauce) to remind me that, oh yeah, I'm in Africa...

Goats and Watermelons

The end of Ramadan, the men praying together.


Dance party!


At exactly noon every day, all the goats in the village (that's, like, several thousand goats!) gather in front of my house on their way out to pasture. You have to see the video to really understand how crazy it is.


A bunch of volunteers met up to celebrate halloween in the city. There's no pumpkins in Mali, so we carved watermelons (which, surprisingly, ARE in Mali)!



And the garden is coming along quickly. We finished the fence in a day, with the help of half the men in the village who showed up to dig holes, cut branches, and tie sticks together. It looks great, and we're going to start planting as soon as I get back to site.

That's the update for now. Life goes along at a slow pace, yet my thoughts run as fast as ever.