Why mud brick constructions?
My husband builds things. Houses. Solar powered cars. Toys for our son.
But he particularly loves the challenge of building with only locally available resources.
One resource that is plentiful in the camp is dirt (as the dark brown colour of my son’s daily bathwater testifies).
It is everywhere.
It is free.
It is what most people use to build their homes.
Naturally, Joshua is going to use it.
But dirt is not the most durable building material.
While it works great when the children of Camp use it to fashion toy houses, when their parents try something on a much larger scale they are not so successful.
Wet season brings torrential downpours that can collapse whole houses.
Dry season turns them into hot ovens.
So Joshua has been trying to work out how to build better with dirt and our home has been the site of these creative solutions.
The aim of the mud brick constructions is two-fold
- Build with locally available, affordable resources.
- Create a design that will not be damaged every rainy season.
If you want concrete you have to fly it in. This means adding at least another $100 for freight for every 50kg of concrete in addition to whatever exorbitant price you already paid for it.
So concrete is not an option for most people.
Over the past year Joshua has been researching and trialing many combinations and recipes for his mud brick constructions with dirt.
His ingredients are some of the following:
- clay,
- sand,
- ash,
- termite mound,
- tree sap
- a white/purple soil known as jir. It is similar to clay and found in some places when you dig deep
- manure
- recycled motor oil.
One day I arrived at the front gate of our compound on my bike.
I was drenched and covered in dirt.
My meeting had been rained out.
My equally wet and dirty husband opened the gate for me.
“Two days of work washed away… That rain was pretty bad timing,” he said with disappointment as he continued to try and clean up the mess from a mud brick construction as the rain eased off.
Two days later I came home to an enthusiastic, “Come check this out!”
Joshua had splashed water on a polished mud roof.
“I removed the oil and the sumok (a local tree sap) from the mixture and look how water resistant it is. Maybe those heavy rains were a blessing after all…”
The following are examples of Joshua’s mud brick constructions.
- Dirt furniture and outdoor sitting area
We live in a 40foot shipping container home.
But inside and outside of this container are numerous dirt creative solutions.
Inside we have my son’s bed, a dividing wall between sections of the container, and our floor made of dirt.
Outside on both sides are shaded sitting areas and a mud oven made from this dirt.
2. Vaults
Nubian vaults are a traditional Egyptian building technique, which almost passed out of memory until an Egyptian Architect, Hassan Fathy, popularised it as an alternative sustainable method.
These are partially submerged structures with a brick vault instead of a timber structure for the roof.
In fact, the design doesn’t use any structural timbers at all.
After Joshua did some initial research on this method, he gave it a go.
Four vaults later he has become quite a whiz at it.
The walls are very thick at the base, so the building has an incredible amount of thermal mass.
These vaults remain significantly cooler than the outside temperatures throughout the day making them a lovely sanctuary from the heat.
One building is guest accommodation and my workspace when not occupied.
The other is a team-mate’s home, another an office for the trauma healing team.
The final building is my favourite: my kitchen and our team eating area.
3. Dirt ‘hobbit home’
This was one of those experiments that did not work as well as hoped.
Unfortunately, ventilation in this partially submerged home wasn’t what was hoped, so it gets quite stuffy in there without a fan.
In saying that, it was a handy space multipurpose space. (Sadly, this hobbit home got washed away in the wet season of 2018).
4. Bunk house’
This was a quick build intended as a place for any extra guests.
But for the last 6 months it has been mainly used as a storage place.
The fun thing about this house is that it was designed to have a living roof, ie designed so you can grow some herbs or small plants on top of it.
I haven’t got organised enough to actually make the most of this feature, so for now it has a tarp on top.
Other than that, it is just made of dirt, wood, straw and sand.
5. Fence posts
We have had many attempts at fences since arriving in in the camp.
The initial two straw ones came down frequently (eaten oh so fast by termites!)
This one lasted the longest, but it too eventually came down in heavy rains.
Still, it was a good experiment.
Fencing is a big issue for people here too.
Free range goats, sheeps and cows don’t mix very well with vegetable gardens.
So, another goal of these dirt creations is to find better solutions for fencing.
These mud brick constructions aren’t finished.
It hasn’t always been easy to have a house and yard in construction, with builders and experiments and mess around, but it is worth it.
Please pray for this creative husband of mine, who rarely does anything the ‘normal’ way.
Pray that he will have wisdom from above and discover the perfect recipe for all this dirt and other things under foot.
Pray that the people of the Camp will have wisdom to build home in this foreign land in a more sustainable way.
Grace and peace
Hope
Written from home in the Refugee Camp, 20th August 2017
Hallelujah in the Mountains 