Thursday we began building an adobe stove at Rusila’s house in Tavua Levu Village. Since Tori (volunteer who came with me to Uganda last year) and I are the only ones who are trained on the method, we decided to build a practice stove at Rusila’s to train everyone else. In addition, we wanted to work out all of the challenges that would inevitably come with building the stoves in a new culture and climate.
We began digging and sorting clay, setting the banana stock pipes, and filling the stove. As the day wore on, the clay pit began drying up, and we found ourselves running very short on the most essential ingredient. Some of Rusila’s nieces took us to different spots where we might find clay. Finally, they brought us to a pond where they used to make bricks. We felt the mud at the bank, which was stickier than regular mud. Desperate, we waded through lake and start throwing globs of river mud into potatoe sacks. My legs were buried up to my mid-calf in lake mud, holding me steady as I felt for and pulled out the most clayish portions. The young kids jumped in started helping. They would bring the clay to me for quality control before they dumped it into the bag.
The bags were ridiculously heavy and when we dumped them out next to the stove, we all laughed pitifully as we came to the realization that the brown gunk was not clay. The sun was beginning to set, so we sent a group back to the original clay pit to excavate what they could and worked feverishly to finish before dark. In order to the fill the stove we began pulled clay from the sides and regions of the stove that seemed less necessary, literally cutting corners to make the clay stretch further. The sun set with the stove unfinished, and we reluctantly planned to come back the following morning to finish. We talked with the village women who were helping us and asked if they could think of anywhere else that we might find clay. They agreed to take us somewhere new in the morning.
On Friday morning at 6:00 David, Bre, Kirsten, Sara, Nate, his wife Cami, and I rolled out of the house and back to the stove. Rusila and her nine year-old cousin, John, led us down unused train tracks to a section where large banks of mud had been overturned. We dug through it and found random clumps of clay and filled our bags with it. We had arranged for a truck to come pick up the load, but before it arrived Kirsten left for a vacation she was taking with a group of our volunteers, Rusila left for a trip to Suva, and Nate and Cami left to teach gardening at Yauladrou.
David, Bre, Sara, and I sat on the tracks for at least an hour throwing clumps of mud into puddles and talking about life and Fiji and poverty and relationships. Finally, we realized the truck wasn’t coming and David set off to find some sort of transport for the clay. As soon as he left a women motioned us to come to her home.
It was a lovely place just outside the village which had obviously been landscaped with great care. She had us sit on a damp pink plush cushion and served us delicious mango juice. She was more well-off than the nearby village-dwellers and was intent on us understanding this distinction as she named the white-collar occupations of her neighbors (policemen, nurses, and teachers). She told us about the husband who had left her and the son who had mixed with the wrong crowd and ended up in jail. We finished covering the major events of our lives, just as David called wondering where we were. As we hurried out of her yard she suggested we stay at Betham Cottage, a beach resort on a nearby island that night.
When we got back to the stove, we were glad we hadn’t decided to just finish it the night before. In the light we could see how ridiculous it looked with the random bore holes we had made the night before. With a fresh supply of clay we filled them in and began filling the rest of the stove. Nate, Cami, Tori, Natalie, and Heather joined us as they had finished their work at Yauladrou. Soon after it began to pour rain. Frantically, we grabbed tarps which the kids held at the corners as David, Nate, Tori, and I crouched and packed the increasingly wet clay that the others were tirelessly bringing to us. Nate drilled holes in the frame to drain off the water and we scooped handfuls of water from the top to avoid all our work being in vain.
At last we finished, covered the stove with tarps, and stood in the rain taking inventory of how dirty we were. Someone through a fistful of mud and almost instinctively all of our volunteers began chucking mud at each other. The kids laughed and squealed with excitement and joined in. After some time the kids began running towards the river, pulling us along. Our step crescendoed to a full sprint along the train tracks until we came to the bridge and jumped into the river.
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