Jamaica Bound

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We are very excited to be returning to our village of Nine Mile in the mountains of Jamaica. First of all its cold here in Cleveland and its much less fun to build things out of mud here when it is cold. Second, what we do seems to have more relevance there than it does in the States. When your building materials are all expensive imported things no one can afford to finish their houses. We are told the custom windows for these arches would have been over $1000 (which is why the house hadn't been finished). Instead we used a cheap angle grinder to cut bottles we found by the side of the road and built these bottle windows for under $100. What we started was finished by our hosts and "Sud", the local handyman. Sud also liked the mud building we were doing because often his neighbors can afford materials or his labor but not both, so he runs out of work.

The kids love the mud too. With a lot of help over our last two trips we have built a small cob cottage and an outdoor kitchen complete with rocket stoves and a pizza oven. With the help of our patrons we are returning to put a better roof on the outdoor kitchen and build a glass bathhouse with its own rocket stove water heater. Since the bones of the hills are all limestone we are also building a lime kiln to make our own lime paint and plaster. The fastest growing resource on the island appears to be plastic trash, so we are also testing ways of recycling it into building materials. If you have any ideas please share them with us. We'll post our results here. Meanwhile "Bless Up! Eyreting gon be ayrie mon!"