A house built out of Mud - Build Day # 1

Day 4 - September 16

When we loaded the bus this morning it was with excited anticipation for our first Habitat Build Day. As we arrived in Mbawa Village, we were greeted as usual with song and dance from women wearing colorful dresses. We were introduced to several local masons that Habitat has helped train and employ in building homes. We are also introduced to the two Habitat partner families with which we will be building.

Lenai, Bayitoni, and Mphatso

Let me introduce you to the partner family. My team helped build a home for Lenai and her two grandchildren. Lenai is about 70 years-old (age is approximate in this culture), and she never went to school. She takes care of two orphaned grandchildren, Mphatso (15) and Bayitoni (12), whose parents died when they were young. The boys have both dropped out of school. They are living in a tiny, one-room house made of mud bricks, a dirt floor, and a grass-thatched roof which leaks heavily when it rains. Their house is so bare -- it seems that all their earthly possessions could fit inside the large suitcases I packed for my trip.

During the rainy season, the grass-thatched roof and scraps of plastic do little to keep out the water, and the dirt floor turns into mud. With virtually no windows, ventilation and air quality is poor. If you stop and listen for a moment, you'll hear termites eating away at the roof of the house.

Typical one-room home

The family regularly suffers from colds and malaria. The family uses a nearby temporary structure as a toilet which is not safe. Lenai is grateful for being selected to own a Habitat home.

"Our house is a breeding ground for mosquitoes because we suffer from malaria from time to time. A good house with windows and mosquito-nets will be a great relief to us," Lenai told us. "We will be very grateful to have a house that does not leak, with a cement floor. It is a rare opportunity and we thank God for granting us this opportunity." 

The masons, along with help from Lenai and the two boys, had already built the corners of the house, so we were able to jump right in laying up the brick walls. Most of our team had never laid a single brick before stepping on the site, but with the coaching of our mason and a few other locals we managed to gain speed and see the house progress.




In Malawi there are bricks everywhere you go -- brick houses and huts, brick walls, piles of brick along the roadside for future construction. There are two kinds of bricks, both which are molded from mud -- fired, and un-fired bricks. We saw brick "kilns" along the roads, where they stack the bricks high, leaving openings in the bottom to add firewood, and when they've heated the bricks for several days they turn from the brown, earthy color, to a reddish brown.

Un-fired vs. fired bricks. Brick firing kiln in the background.

The matope (mortar) that we use is made simply by digging a hole in the thick soil near the construction site, adding water, and hauling it in wheelbarrows. These houses are literally made out of the dirt that surrounds them!

Fired bricks are still soft by American standards, but houses built with fired bricks can withstand the dangerous floods, whereas the mud brick houses can collapse. About 26,000 are affected by floods every rainy season, but this past January, there was a devastating flood in southern Malawi that killed several hundred people, and displaced 638,000 people (I don't know if this even made the news in the US). Farmland was washed away, leaving people that scrape a meager living off of the land without home, tools, or means to grow food to eat.

After lunch under a massive baobab tree (without leaves or fruit during the dry season), we visit a local school. The dark classrooms were packed full of kids, with not enough teachers to go around. One class may consist of 60, 80, or even 100 kids. Education is required by the government, but many children are not able to go. One reason kids don't attend school is that their family is so poor they can not afford to buy their children pencils and a notebook. Another deterrence from school is needing to help carry water (where there are not nearby wells), or during the rainy season, children living in thatch-roofed houses cannot attend because they cannot keep their books dry. 

One of the highlights of building is being able to spend a day immersed in a village, surrounded by the sights and sounds of daily life. While the conversations and singing are in a language foreign to our ears, we recognize the universal language of children laughing and playing, babies crying, and roosters crowing. By the end of the day, we are physically and emotionally tired, and ready to return to our lodge (albeit in the midst of a brownout) for a time of reflection and relaxation.

House # 1, at the end of our first day of construction.

Here's a few more pictures from our day:

Music recorded from a song and dance performed for us by girls at the local school.