Curious George, Day 17: Brick-Making

You can huff and puff all you want, but you’ll never be able to blow them down! 100% natural and from Nauela, these clay-and-water blocks are baked to (almost) perfection.

I’m sure you’ve all thought about how many steps actually go into producing something deceivingly simple, like the cap on a jar of Snapple, or the wrapper of a Starburst. I knew making bricks couldn’t be a one-step process, but I didn’t know exactly how many steps would need hundreds of helping hands.

Taking the mud from the ground and molding it into a rectangle shape is the most straightforward part. Each student was responsible for making 75 bricks, which totals, approximately:

(1000 students – 281 students that will never show up) * (75 bricks/student – 32 bricks that will crack in half/student) = 30,917 bricks

Students made bricks over a period of 4 weeks, a few arriving at the school each day in their work clothes. The process involves spending a few hours standing in a mud-pit up to your ankles, or up to your eyebrows, depending on what end of the body you’re standing on.

Each student used a hoe to dig a dirt-pit, then carried bucket after bucket of water to turn it into a mud-pit. One otherwise normal weekday, Nooreen and I showed up at the school ready to get dirt under our fingernails. The students were a little surprised, as were my colleagues when we showed up where they were gathered in a classroom, ready to throw mudballs at them.

Let's just say it’s not culturally normal for a teacher to play in the mud.

But there we were, up to our kidneys in the mud-pits, stomping around and laughing at the sound of it squelching between our toes. We clumsily tried to do what my students so un-thoroughly explained to us: pick up a ball of mud, slop it into the mold, smooth the top. So many doubts – should it be flat, or rise above the mold? Perfectly smooth or texturized? Where can I carve my initials? Finally, turn the mold upside-down so the brick slides out onto the ground. Let dry for a couple days.

 

They look like bricks, but hold your horses. And goats and chickens. You didn’t think we could build a library with raw bricks, did you? To bake our 30,917 bricks, first the students must carry all the bricks from where they are toasting in the sun to right next to the library site. Then, the students must go into the woods to cut branches and trunks to cook the bricks. Then, the students must carry the wood, one big trunk or bundle of branches at a time, from where it was chopped to the library site, one mile. Then, students must pile the bricks into oven shapes and put mud in all the crevices. Then, students must light a fire in each oven and sit with the bricks tending the fires for 24 hours while they bake.

Apparently someone got hungry and
took a bite out of the middle brick.

Every sentence above that started with “the students must…” is another day of activities. The students do these activities only once a week, so each of those sentences equals another week of waiting for the bricks to be ready. The process is moving forward “little by little,” as my colleagues love to say. Day by day, brick by brick. Hopefully that doesn’t mean this will take 30,917 days.

brick ovens. Pizza, anyone?

Nooreen demonstrates her hoeing abilities

Nooreen's First Brick!

My First Wet-Dry Brick.