Kenya Build

February/March, 2023

Big Thanks to the Sparks Rotary for their generous contribution to the project!

We went to Kenya to teach our techniques through a five-week complete cabin build. We worked with nine Kenyan apprentices and over 30 local Maasai women. Kyle and our American apprentice Thaddeus were there for all five weeks and Jonathan and Sarah for two.

The building site was just 40 km outside of Nairobi but a world away. It took about two hours to reach the site including a grueling hour and a half on the worst road I’ve ever been on. The land got drier the further out we went and soon goats and cows vastly outnumbered people. Maasai homes dotted the landscape as the plaintive hope for rain hung in the air with the dust. The vegetation, the ground, and the rocks were all shades of brown and tan. We wondered how people could live in such a barren place that was part of a bigger region seeing its worst drought in forty years. That thought remained until the end of week three when the heat and fierce nightly winds gave way to nightly thunder storms and then even heavy daytime rains. The rains had finally come for real and the land drank up everything that was given. In a matter of days, trees leafed out, grasses sprouted from between the stones, and insects by the thousands appeared in the air. It was a land transformed. We got the roof on just in time.

In Maasai culture, women are responsible for the building and upkeep of the traditional “manyatta” huts. Formerly a pastoral and nomadic people, their huts never needed to be large or even long-lasting. They were and still are built using upright sticks covered in mud. Now, however, the Maasai own property and are more settled but their manyattas have remained universally small, dark, smoky, and leaky.

They were excited to learn about how we build including how we make a trench and foundation, our plaster recipes, how thick and strong our walls are, how we can incorporate built-in shelves in thick cob walls, how we make adobe blocks, set in windows, and pour and trowel earthen floors. Our hostess, BT, told us she had never heard the Maasai dreaming about making better homes until they started building with us.

Our Kenyan apprentices were also excited to take what they learned into their next building projects including homes, ovens, floors, and interior plasters.

Each day at the work site there would be three - five languages being spoken: English, Swahili, Maasai, and then other tribal languages deepening on who was working or visiting. This often made it challenging to communicate instructions or technique. Swahili was most commonly used by the Kenyan apprentices (who represented 6 different tribes!) and our hostess while many of the Maasai knew only their native Maasai tongue with some knowing Swahili and maybe a couple words in English. Many of the apprentices were not fluent in English while we, of course, were limited to just English (although I definitely reverted to Spanish on occasion).

The cabin will be BT’s home when she retires from her job with a church in Nairobi.

She intends to use this experience as a springboard for further workshops, community work, and builds in the future:

• earthen kitchen at the nearby primary school

• earthen building for kids

• cob ovens

• Alternative septic/composting toilets

• Organic gardening

• Food dehydrating

• Water harvesting

• …and more

The trip was funded mostly through donations.