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- Picture perfect
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- Children bringing us clean water
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- Getting ready to stomp
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- Getting dirty!
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- Mud dance!
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- Bend, roll and …
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- THROW!!!
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- Second layer of mud complete!
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- :)
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- The beautiful children
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- Just can’t get enough of this
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- Jealous yet?
Adventures in Mudding a Chicken Coop! (say what?)
So, I met another American in Kakamega – Eric from Indiana! He is currently collaborating with a local Kenyan, Chris, to build and run a home for orphaned street kids in the community. The street kids are either neglected from their families, who are themselves struggling to fight for survival, have run away from home, or have been orphaned due to a variety of circumstances. Whatever the reason, they spend their days and nights on the streets, begging for money, walking around sniffing high concentrate glue to get them high. Chris’s dad donated an acre of his land to the project and they have just started building the compound! They are building semi-permanent structures made of wood and mud with a tin roof to ward off the daily rain. It was such a blessing to meet the pair of them because I was able to go out to the village and join them last week in applying the second layer of mud to the inside of the chicken coop!!!
1) Trudge down hillside through gardens, burned sugar cane stalks, maize and mud for 15 minutes to fill pails with water from water source.
2) Make another trip back down and up. Note: The women and children here make carrying buckets of water on their head easy. It is not. It is hard and I am sore. Epic fail.
3) Pour water on mound of mud inside chicken coop, making a little puddle of water on top. With bare feet, stomp on wet mud until well mixed. With shovel, scoop dry mud towards you. With hands, pour more water on mound. Continue until the whole floor of the chicken coup is a covered with just the right consistency of wet mud – technically explained by Chris as “when you stand on the mud, you should sink all the way down”. Let me just add here that this is the most fun I’ve had in ages. Dancing around in mud is exactly what your parents told you not to do as a kid!
4) With hands, bend over and scoop mud – rolling like a snowball into a ball.
5) Pick up mud, section off a smaller scoop with right hand, take position and ….
6) Throw the mud against the wall! No seriously, that’s how you build a semi-permanent house here. Aim is key, but not critical. If you miss where you were originally intended to hit, simply try again.
7) Repeat steps 4-6 until inside of chicken coop is covered with mud and sticks are no longer exposed.
8 ) Allow mud to dry overnight while praying that it doesn’t rain too hard.
9) Wash hands, legs and feet with remaining clean water and voila!! Mudding complete! We will be returning to apply the third and final layer of mud to the chicken coop tomorrow 
