Like a Ton of Bricks. Or A Pit.

Every day when we head back up to the house to shower, Phil and I are faced with an insurmountable number of bricks. The first day we were so impressed to learn that they were made by hand, and we were even more impressed later when we saw them in action, and realized that they were also made by foot. And now, we've made them ourselves!

Something like 2500 bricks are going into the addition to the farmhouse, which is being built now. It's been awesome to see the ground go from being shaded by an enormous banana tree, to being a square of cement, to being a skeletal brick frame, to reaching over our heads. The biggest lesson we have taken away from this: "Be very careful where you plant banana trees. They are a piece of work when you want to get them out."

Two of the young Karen guys, Wat and Som Kid, are usually the ones whom we see working up there. They can do 100 bricks in a day(!). Phil and I, with Som Kid as our teacher, accomplished 20 in three hours. Clearly, we will never be able to compete with these guys for business.

The bricks are composed of three ingredients thoroughly mixed together with water: red clay (okay it probably doesn't have to be red), the leftover husks from hulled rice grains, and sand.

Here's the process.

Wear shorts. Locate a large flat place where you can pile a lot of clay and a lot of sand, preferably adjacent to a flat place where you can dig a big pit. Pile the clay and sand. Dig a pit. Bring rice husks in bags. Layer the clay, sand, and rice husks one after another in the pit, like a pit of deep, earthy lasagna. Fill the clay/sand/rice husks pit with water so that it's totally saturated and now can be accurately described as a goopy, lumpy, wet, scratchy red mud pit.

Take off your shoes. If applicable, cover your blindingly white upper legs in sunscreen.

Now you have to mix the sludgy, delicious-looking contents of the pit together thoroughly so that you have mud that's solid enough to hold its form when pressed into a brick. Don't bother actually trying to press it into a brick; we have a contraption for that. Achieve this mixture by stepping into the pit with your poor unsuspecting feet and marching in place. As you march, use your trusty job (pronounciation: halfway between the word for employment and the name of He Who Did Not Complain, like jaawbp) to hack off chunks of the unstomped sludge and drag them under your merciless feet. The rice husks will scratch at your feet. The mixture will actually smell pretty aromatic, and vaguely sweet. Continue marching, occasionally taking a series of sideways steps to move one section of the pit over to another, for at least half an hour. Add more of all three ingredients if it's too wet.

When it's thoroughly mixed (aka when Som Kid says, Paw laew, "Finished"), it's time to form it into bricks using said contraption. Scoop a hefty bunch of it into a wheelbarrow and wheel over to the edge of your large flat space. Put contraption on ground. The contraption is a mold; it looks like a six-foot ladder made of two-by-fours. Pour the mixture from the wheelbarrow into the mold. Squish the mud inside each brick-shaped compartment down with both palms, Thai massage-style, so that the whole compartment is well filled. Take a concrete scraper and level off the exposed face of the bricks, wetting as needed to fill the corners. With one person grasping each end of the mold, carefully lift it, keeping it level. You may giggle at the slight sucking sound as the mold comes off. Ta-da! Four bricks remain, holding their shape like Jell-O. Or else you did it wrong. Repeat 25 times.

But the best part is definitely writing on the bricks at the end. That, and playing in the mud.