Ochan Self-Help Alliance

First, apologies to Rojina whose name was misspelled in our blogpost of July 30, 2010. Pictured here is the courtyard at Rojina’s compound which has turned into a worksite for the building of her new, durable home. 4,000 ISSB bricks made by Opac youth trainees under supervision, stand ready for service next to their brick-making machines. In the background a traditional home slumps while to its right a tree stands tall, perhaps sensing that this is its lucky day: it has been spared the ax as these ISSB bricks dry on their own in 4-24 hours due to their composition of cement, murrum, sand, and water. Gone is the the traditional method of hardening mud bricks through firing in an oven for days.

Rojina’s walls are now rising and one of the housing leaders in our project, Esther, is inspecting how these bricks interlock both vertically and horizontally for a tight fit that reduces the amount of mortar needed to bind them.

Closeup of one outer wall

Murrum for the bricks has not been dug in the courtyard, so no gaping depression will be left to adversely affect the environment; instead, it is extracted with permission from one of many government-owned murrum quarries used to mend the roads in the area. Pictured are the trainees along with OCHAN’s president, William, digging and loading quality murrum into our lorry.

Our lorry gets sand from a privately owned quarry a few miles away. OCHAN pays the owner by the lorry-load.

We hope our next blog on this project will be soon and present to you Rojina in front of her completed new house.