Outside my tent, spitting distance away, is a field full of green machicha. It is the one and only green veggie visible in these parts. A leafy plant similar to spinach. It gets watered daily and the hose is wrangled between our tents predawn ever since the day our gardener turned into the night guard. We are sleeping in the shade of the future office for the Baobob home, a natural building created from cob with a palm thatched roof that looks lovely but still needs some tweaking.
The earth is rising here at the shamba. The wind blows in a predictable direction each day (southeasterly) and it is full of dust. Initially, because things were not in place for construction of the second building we chipped away at the lime based plaster which made thick fortress for the termites. At times dust blew in our eyes but we chipped away with trowels, machetes and broken bits of tile. The cob underneath is dry now, but the new buildings will be a challenge and Elka, mistress of problem solving and tireless bagger has reconfigured it. I'm anxious to see how the compressed clay will be placed and she is masterminding how to purchase a machine to have on site.
We have spent days moving the earth/sand - shoveling, sorting, piling, bagging, and tamping it all into the correct place. The focus is on the earthbag foundation. Putting sand in bags is seemingly simple, yet this is not so. Each load needs a mix of cement,clay sand and water. Each 50 pound load bag needs to be hauled to the other side of the building, and individual bags need to be plopped in place without spillage. And about 500 bags later we have just filled in the tunnels that were dug. We sweat and rip our pants on the barbed wire that lays on top of each layer, but we trod along with help. The Tanzanian volunteers do a giant chunk of the labor in the intense heat and
we put in long days until these clumpy, back breaking, arm wrenching bags are ground level. Yes, it is all done with only one hammer, a level and a line of string!!- an impossible task without you Boys from Baobob. Asante SANA!!!
