BELARUS - A MiND OPENiNG (BUiLDiNG) SAFARi
(jULY / AUGUST 2007)
In 2007 I signed up for a 30 hour bus trip from Berlin to
Belarus. Of course, it wasn’t the bus trip I was mostly
interested in. It wasn’t just Belarus either, because I
could have taken a train which would have been faster and
more comfortable. It was a much more interesting reason
behind the torture of my legs being squeezed down to half
their length on the way from Berlin to Stari Lepel. With
thirty others I was joining the German aid organisation
“Heimstatt Tschernobyl e.V.” to go and build yet another
house for a family from the still radioactive zone in the
south of the country, to move further north. At first my
main interest lay in building with Earth, because that was
the way they already built two settlements of about 50
houses over the past 10 years. But during those three weeks
I learned much more than just the right mix of earth, wood
chips and water to make a house of it.
town sign of Stari Lepel and Orthodox cross. Every so tiny
village has one of those.
Thanks to the borders police that only let us wait one hour
instead of four or five, we arrived a little earlier in
Stari Lepel than planned. The village was tiny and quiet
and the Belorussian sky was hanging low above us. We were
all put into different houses that were built over the last
years exactly the way we were going to build another one.
So there - in front of us - we saw what we were going to
produce.
Basically - every year a couple of families got a new
house. For that they had to leave the radioactive area in
the south of Belarus (and with that also their friends and
close family members). For most of them that was the
highest price they had to pay. Another part of the deal
was, that they had to help build their new house and - once
they moved in - let one or two volunteers like us stay
there during those three weeks we spent expanding their
little settlement.
the policeman’s house - our home for the next weeks
Jan and me were put in a policeman’s house who lived there
with his two daughters. The mother was in hospital
suffering kidney damage - a bad souvenir from back home.
The policeman kindly offered us his bedroom and moved into
the living room for the time being.
After we settled into our rooms we all got together at the
bicycle garage to hire a bike for the duration of our stay.
It also allowed us to cycle to the nearest town and do some
shopping if needed. That’s what we did straight away.
Exchange some money and walk around the market with big
eyes.
In the late afternoon we visited site and got an
introduction of the building works ahead of us.
the
house and what it looked like when we
arrived
The first day on site was exciting as - for most of us - we
haven’t worked on a building site before. Ever. We all got
our little jobs, instructions how to do them and off we
went. An hour or two later the site was as busy as if it
had been going on for weeks. I was in the loam coating
team. We had to mix water with a tiny bit of clay until it
became as consistent as hot chocolate. It even looked a bit
like that and made you want to try some. That we had to
apply to the whole timber structure. It helps to balance
the moisture in the timber because loam has got a lower
equilibrium moisture content and can therefore absorb water
from the wood in case that gets wet. This is a common way
of protecting the wood from moisture damage.
loam coating the timber structure... every corner of it
!
It didn’t look as a hard enough job, especially after we
spent the entire morning trying to get the right consitency
of the loam mix while talking and chatting away. But after
we had painted the whole timber structure downstairs and
half the roof structure our arms got longer and the first
sunburn weakened our body.
In the evening we had the celebration of the finished
skeleton planned. This is a typical German tradition once
the roof structure is up and the building can stand on its
own. A tiny tree branch is put up on the roof as a
connection to where the structure came from and then the
carpenter and the client go up there, they have a speech
prepared and a drinking slogan and with a shot of vodka
they cheer to the house. The vodka they drink, the glass
they smash on the roof. Unfortunately it was pouring down
with rain that evening and there was now way of anybody
climbing up the house nor anybody standing there cheering.
So we drank the vodka in the kitchen and celebrated quickly
in the morning with coke as there wasn’t any alcohol
allowed on site.
“Richtfest”
- celebrating the house standing up and hoping for a long
life
to be continued...
