A Pictorial Progression of the Green House

Step One: Mud with some straw mixed in

This mud is then crafted into a lot of bricks.

The mud bricks we used for the green house we made for us before we got there, but here you can see the workers fitting mud into a wooden tool (seen best near the guy on the right's foot). They do this for hours.

And here is the original site of the greenhouse, taken after the first day of work. There were already some plants growing in the middle, and we spent the majority of the day moving brick mountain near the sit of construction. We also put rocks in the trench, and made an outline for the cement with

 wooden boards (Kevin, Maria's son is sitting in between them and in a couple pictures below).

The rest of our work site

Day Two!

There was a team brick, and a team cement. Team brick continued to move bricks closer to the job site, while team cement started to make cement using pebbles, special cement powder (first picture below), water, and the machine in the below picture. The cement was going to be the strong foundation we would later put bricks on top of.

Team cement also began pouring the cement into the board skeleton we made the day before. We would pour some of the cement, throw rocks in the middle of the cement block, and then we would smooth out the top.

We also made another board mold for the one remaining side. Here is a nice action shot of Joe doing so.

Then we had a great weekend! Here is day three. Today was the day the mud pit began. We had a hose running through some dirt we had moved, and we mixed the dirt with water to make mud that we would use to fill in cracks between the mud bricks. We mixed the mud using our feet, shovels, and pick axes.

And we started laying the mud bricks! It was easy to see the results of our hard work today.

We layed the cement for the last side also.

Day 4, the mud pit got significantly smaller, but we worked really hard to make the greenhouse 8 bricks tall. It was so exciting to see our progress today!

Day 5 began with these giant trees (as Patrick Wilson put it, "the lost truffula tree"). We had to take hammers and pics and take the outer layer of bark off of them. It was a pretty fun task! These were going to be used to the structure of the roof and top of the windows.

Jamie flashes a winning smile at the trees she stripped

After that, we began to form the brick pyramid that would give structure to the roof. This part was deemed as two fragile for us to build ourselves, so we would hand the bricks up to experienced workers. This was also a rough day because we needed even more bricks, and we had to wheelbarrow 300 of them from a different site. The first brick pyramid was finished today.

Day six (Thursday) began with wheeling about 100 more bricks from a different site. The other brick pyramid was built, and the experienced Peruvians started to put up the rafters (the trees we had stripped).

Day Seven! Last day of the greenhouse! The morning started with the local women teaching us how to make ovens to cook potatoes--then, they let us try to build them! Unfortunately, I got caught up in the oven making so I didn't take pictures. Once we began working on the greenhouse, we started unrolling yellow plastic across the top. We held the plastic down as a team while a Peruvian worker would hammer wood over the plastic to keep in taut. 

And alas, we were done!! 

Cheers,

Katelyn Rowley