Helping Local Guys Build with Local Materials

These are the local Mayan guys from Amatenango, who speak Tseltal & build in the traditional way. This is Tomas the dad & Silviano, one of his sons. I helped them for two days, learned a tiny bit of Tseltal & had a memorable & much fun time of it.

This is the structure we were building. It is being built of twigs cut locally & nailed to both sides of posts. This coming week they will create a mud of dirt dug just meters from the house, & dry pine needles collected from the local forest. They will then throw this mud between the twigs & create mud walls for this structure, an Earth Ship that Santiago, the son of my friend Luis is building for himself on their ranch.

This is the front porch of the ranch house. And following is the kitchen that we cooked in by candlelight, since there is no electricity there, except what can be collected by one solar panel feeding a batteried generator, which is mostly used to charge cell phones & operate Santiago's computer.

And this is where I slept, upstairs in the ranch house. The sun flooded in each morning at 7, waking up the cell phone bird, who promptly woke me. The cell phone bird is some form of grackle or magpie that has learned to reproduce the sounds of many things, but chose the cell phone ring with which to wake me each morning.

And now I am back in San Cristobal, my friend Alejandra is home & a new week begins. Hasta luego.