I don’t have time to write much today.  We have driven 30 minutes to the closest town.  Does that tell you where we are?  In the middle of the wilderness!  I spent the first night in Denver at an interesting hotel.  The next day I met Laura at the airport and we took a cab to the bus station down town and headed for Salida where we were met by Zia who drove us to the build site.

It is an interesting group of people here, very diverse…me, a missionary.  Laura, a university professor teaching Spanish translation.  Roche and Zia, a couple who have just sold everything and are moving to Equador.  Mike, and his family, a mixture of cultures who are panning on moving back to the Carribean, Pontious  and  his family who are interested in living a more back to the earth lifestyle and Luke, an 18 year old dynamo.  Luke is building community gardens through out his town and the surrounding area, working with half way houses and homeless.  Already he has helped create a garden that has grown into a market run by local people who are benefitting from the income generated by the market.

All are vegetarians who only eat organic food so the meals have been interesting – rice and lentils the first night, cabbage, onions and eggs for breakfast, beans and lambs quarters (lambs ear to me) that Zia and I foraged from the grounds around us for lunch.  And the leftovers from all of that along with the gooseberries and currents that we foraged along the creek for dinner…

Zia is a permaculture instructor and her vast knowledge of natural foods and growing methods is an added bonus to what we are learning in the build process.

Day 1 of the build we learned about soil testing and why it is important and started digging the foundation for the house we are building for Tutuksuma (I think that is right) a Tibetan Buddhist elder whose dream is to build a peace and healing center on this site.  A dream she has held on to for 20 years.  He message to us was never give up on your dreams, have the courage to wait for them to happen.  And blessed us all for being a part of her miracle.

In addition her, we are a very diverse group, religiously and spiritually – me the Christian, a Muslim, some who believe in a spiritual connection to the earth and some who haven’t said.

Day 2 – we tested different sand/clay mixtures for making the adobe bricks that will become the roof of the Nubian vault, the walls will be made of the adobe and hiperadobe bricks.  The rest I will show you in pictures.

The foundation begins with about a six inch trench we used the large rocks we had filtered from the dirt to make the base, for stability and a place for the water to go when it rains to pull it away from the foundation of the house.  Then we filled and tamped in gravel to make it stable.  Today we will begin to make the adobe bricks by mixing sand and clay and pressing them into forms and laying them in the sun to dry.  120 a day is our goal – we need 1,000, just for the vault.  We will also begin filling bags with gravel to make the bricks for the foundation.  Once that is complete we will begin to mix the earth bags and lay them in place.  I am excited to see those processes begin to take place. 

We planned to have a ceremony to celebrate laying the first bag, however, we were hit with a major thunder, hail and rain storm so I assume that will happen this morning.

I will write more when I can.  I don’t know when our next trip to town will be…

Blessings to you all!

Sharon

Blessing ceremony

preparing the build site

I can chunk rocks to form the base of the foundation...

working on the foundation

A typical meal - polenta, white beans, lambs quarters,
purple cabbage with onions and eggs
(polenta & cabbage, breakfast left overs)

dish washing station

filling the foundation with gravel

foraging gooseberries for lunch

my home for the next 18 days..

first bricks

foundation level complete