Ahh! I never expected it to get so chilly here in Honduras. Luckily I packed a sweatshirt and I´ve been finding new ways to work up a sweat. On our walk to Comedor last week, Chanel and I passed a man making adobe bricks in a little open plot amidst the normal row of homes and before I knew it, we had plans to come back the next day to learn how to make them with him. This actually seems like a perfect example of how life usually goes here and even though I know it has partly to do with the fact that we´re noticeably not Honduran, I hope as the months pass I won't forget to marvel at such a culture of spontaneous welcome.
Anyway, making adobe bricks is hard work! First you mix pine needles, water and dirt [dirt being the technical term] in a huge pile using a hoe and your bare feet. After the ingredients are sufficiently combined into the clay mixture, you clear some flat ground on which to put the bricks to dry in the sun and then cover the ground with sawdust so the bricks don't stick. Then you heave the clay into a wooden mold - my guess is that the mold makes bricks about 12 inches long, 6 inches wide, 4 inches deep. Big! And heavy! And because the bricks are big, you have to make sure that there are no air bubbles in the finished product. This involves a certain amount of punching and slapping around in the mud that is very satisfying.
Once this is done, you pull the mold up and out, and you have a brick. Repeat the heaving and punching about five million more times, or however many bricks you need to build a whole house, and then let them dry for a few days. Many homes in the city are now made with concrete blocks, others with corrugated tin sheets, wood scraps and cardboard, but by far the majority here are made of adobe. You could certainly say it's a slower and less sophisticated process than housing construction in the U.S. but I doubt the world economy would haven been so bulldozed if we built our U.S. homes this way and it's incredible, really, to have the power to build a place of your own.
I always feel a little under the gun writing these posts because on the computer here at the internet cafe is a timer telling me the amount of time I´ve been online and the corresponding price that keeps tick, tick, ticking higher. I feel like this timer would be a useful monitor for other activities, maybe like worrying or navel-gazing, but not in this instance when I am trying to correspond with you, my favorite people in the United States. On another note, isn´t it strange that we call ourselves Americans, instead of Unitedstatespersons or something along those lines? In Spanish, there´s a word: Estadounidense. Soy (I am) estadounidense (unitedstatesperson). ¨American¨ doesn´t really fit the bill because technically all South Americans, Central Americans, and North Americans would fall into this category but ... we ¨Americans¨ build really big fences an to prevent that kind of fraternization.
Anyway, making adobe bricks is hard work! First you mix pine needles, water and dirt [dirt being the technical term] in a huge pile using a hoe and your bare feet. After the ingredients are sufficiently combined into the clay mixture, you clear some flat ground on which to put the bricks to dry in the sun and then cover the ground with sawdust so the bricks don't stick. Then you heave the clay into a wooden mold - my guess is that the mold makes bricks about 12 inches long, 6 inches wide, 4 inches deep. Big! And heavy! And because the bricks are big, you have to make sure that there are no air bubbles in the finished product. This involves a certain amount of punching and slapping around in the mud that is very satisfying.
Once this is done, you pull the mold up and out, and you have a brick. Repeat the heaving and punching about five million more times, or however many bricks you need to build a whole house, and then let them dry for a few days. Many homes in the city are now made with concrete blocks, others with corrugated tin sheets, wood scraps and cardboard, but by far the majority here are made of adobe. You could certainly say it's a slower and less sophisticated process than housing construction in the U.S. but I doubt the world economy would haven been so bulldozed if we built our U.S. homes this way and it's incredible, really, to have the power to build a place of your own.
I always feel a little under the gun writing these posts because on the computer here at the internet cafe is a timer telling me the amount of time I´ve been online and the corresponding price that keeps tick, tick, ticking higher. I feel like this timer would be a useful monitor for other activities, maybe like worrying or navel-gazing, but not in this instance when I am trying to correspond with you, my favorite people in the United States. On another note, isn´t it strange that we call ourselves Americans, instead of Unitedstatespersons or something along those lines? In Spanish, there´s a word: Estadounidense. Soy (I am) estadounidense (unitedstatesperson). ¨American¨ doesn´t really fit the bill because technically all South Americans, Central Americans, and North Americans would fall into this category but ... we ¨Americans¨ build really big fences an to prevent that kind of fraternization.