Building with adobe mud bricks in Ohio is not "a thing"

I’m soaking wet, standing in the middle of a field in Dayton, Ohio as rain is pouring down…and all I see around me is mud. It is in this moment that it finally hits me…“I’ve made a horrible mistake...”

I am many things, but one descriptor phrase is: "I’m a pusher". Read on to learn how I came about this self-realization in ministry and how I found myself standing in a field of mud.

Let’s rewind to the Spring of 2007, a man who can only be described as the jolliest person’ besides good ole St. Nick was digging a post hole in order to build a tree house. This isn’t your typical, back yard tree house, this was a tree house built for a community. The man’s name was David Helmers and he was the architect and designed this tree house.

David Helmers is working hard digging his hole for this massive 20’ pole that would be one of 8 to hold up the tree house. This tree house is right in the heart of this community known as el dumpe in Tijuana, Mexico – the city dump. Some time ago, the dump stop being used for trash because so many of the poorest of the poor in Tijuana had no where to go, very little resources, and found themselves on the edge of society. The only place they could find refuge was in this place where they could go through the left overs from others in order to build shelter. The people who live here are, like the trash that surrounds them, the discarded members of society.

I try to avoid clichés like “it’s a God thing” but there is no other way to describe what happens next. As David was

breaking a sweat, digging this hole he finds that he is not hitting dirt with his shovel. He quickly realizes he’s hitting a book. He immediately recognizes one of the words in the title: “arquitectura”. David, even though he only knows maybe five words in Spanish he was certain this book was about architecture. Can you believe it?! An architect from Ohio, just so happens to travel down to Tijuana, Mexico for his first ever mission trip finds this book.

Not knowing a lick of Spanish got his hands on the English version of the book he found: Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt written by Hassan Fathy. He wasn’t able to put the book down. After a quick read and doing more research, David believed that houses could be built in Mexico using Adobe mud bricks.

Adobe mud bricks were literally the building blocks of many ancient civilizations, and continue to be used today. Adobe is a non-fired sun-dried mud bricks consisting of material found on earth (combinations of organic material including dirt, clay, straw, and water). Building with adobe mud bricks was a common prehistoric practice in arid and semi-arid lands around the world – including in Mexico. The process of making adobe bricks is sustainable, affordable, and easily learned.

Now I entered the picture that fall in 2007, a few months after David first went to Mexico and found the book that changed his life. I started working with David’s church as part of the Student Ministry team at the age of 21 when I was still in college and long before seminary and ordination was even on my radar. I met David and we really hit it off. He got even more excited to learn that I had my own history with the ministries in Tijuana, Mexico starting from the age of 14 and we immediately started dreaming. In Tina Fey’s Bossypants she reveals a concept from the world of improv comedy that I’ve worked to incorporate in my life. It’s called simply “yes and.” It means first saying “yes” to, then building and improving upon what is given. Conversations with David tended to have a lot of “yes and’s” in them.

David and I started focusing on the idea of using adobe mud bricks instead of wood to build homes for the people living in Tijuana’s former dump. We felt that there were many benefits of building with adobe mud bricks on mission trips.

•  Mud bricks cannot be made during the duration of the trip; the mud bricks must be formed and dried before the team even touches down on the mission field. This results in spending the money locally to people in relationship with the group or organization rather than the Home Depot of Mexico or other chain businesses.
• More people would be able to help on the work site. While each person will need to learn the process and rhythm of building with mud bricks, it takes little to no prior skill or knowledge. This allows the children, teenagers, and other adults from the area work on the construction site.
• Finally, the cost is significantly cheaper than building with other materials, allowing more churches and organizations to be able to participate in or support an international trip. David estimated that it would cost $2,000 to build a house out of adobe mud bricks whereas we were spending $6,500-7,000 to build a house out of wood.

We were so excited to go down the next time to present our idea and we were just crushed that after the presentation we were told “No that is never going to work.” I realized then that not every one has the “yes and” mantra that I’ve come to live by.

That should have been the end of the story, but not being able to fight off my natural pusher ways we decided that if we just showed them it could work, perhaps people would be open to this different way of building houses.

One of the other things that the leadership in Mexico brought up was that they feared that the adobe bricks would not hold up long term like concrete, brick, or wood. We decided to test out the durability of mud bricks in Ohio by building a wall and a dog house in order to see how it would hold up over a year’s time.

While the mud brick process was indeed easy, especially with willing and hardworking teenagers and adults, the summer rain proved to be detrimental to the project. As soon as over one hundred bricks were formed, it began to downpour. Rain poured for three days straight, completely destroying the one hundred mud bricks.

Looking back, I realized how hard I pushed. This all could have been easily avoided if we didn’t overlook one of the “cardinal rules” of missions. Even from the beginning, none of the conversations and planning involved the people we were in relationship with Tijuana right away. I was pushing and we didn’t even know it because we failed to include the perspectives and experiences of the very people we wanted to serve.

I realized just how hard I pushed for this experiment to happen, I pushed companies and people to donate most of the supplies for what was now a mud pile, I pushed for people to come and take part in this initiative, and it turned out to be quite the mess. Let it be known that building with adobe mud bricks in Ohio is not “a thing”.

It took standing in that muddy field to realize how harmful that mentality and way of going about ministry, especially missions, could be.  Yes, I had the best of intensions and thought I was doing the right thing, but by pushing what I believed was best, I had made a real mess of things. Literally. And VERY publicly.

I was defeated. I was heartbroken. It was just one more piece of evidence that the way we went about missions was totally screwed up and backwards. Something had to change – and it wasn’t the people we were working with. It was us.

I spent a lot of time after that experience reflecting back on what had led to that point. It wasn’t that we had gotten it all wrong, in fact I think we got a lot right, but we definitely made mistakes along the way and in order to move on and evolve it required me to stop pushing and pump the brakes a little bit.

Standing in the mud field, I realized that I still had more to learn. However, I think that’s the whole point right? This could be a story about failure but I’ve come to understand that we only fail when we fail to learn. This experience provided a learning opportunity that completely changed the way I went about being in service with others. That’s one of the key words, “with”. Often in mission and outreach ministries we hear the prepositions of “to” or “for” but both lack the posture of partnership and working hand in hand. That’s where my pushing nature kicked in. I felt that I had something to prove rather than trying to work with the people to see what their hopes and dreams were for the future of the ministries in Tijuana.

We were trying to be the voice of who we considered to be voiceless people. But the people we were working with already had a voice - we just weren’t listening. By pumping the brakes rather than pushing it offers the chance to be present in the moment on mission trips and in everyday ministry. Not with a mentality of “doing” but one of “being with”. By being with people, I have been able to slow down - being people oriented instead of task oriented - in order to listen and really hear the needs and dreams of people around me. And often, there is then an invitation to figure out a way to work side by side in order to accomplish this.

The story of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem fully illustrates this new way of being for me. Nehemiah heard about the state that his homeland was in. Instead of just rushing off to save the day…Nehemiah was a man who believed in the power of prayer and right timing and relationships and returned to Jerusalem in order to rebuild the city. Nehemiah knew that he couldn’t go about this task alone and after being with and talking with the families he enlisted the help of the people of Jerusalem in order to quickly repair the wall in 52 days.

A friend of mine from college wrote me a letter (yes that still happens) and in it he wrote this poem from Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher from the 7^th century BC, which sums up Nehemiah’s story and approach:

"Go to the people, live among them.

Learn from them, plan with them.

Build on what they have.

Teach by showing, learn by doing.

Not relief but release,

And when the task is finish

And when their work is done,

The people will remark,

“We have done it ourselves.”

This is what embodies what being in ministry with people is all about. I knew all of this intellectually but I had gotten so caught up in my agenda, my dream that I had forgotten what is really important – and it is a mission of being. The work is just an excuse to go and create, build, and sustain relationships.  And I would have truly failed if I failed to learn, humble myself, and return to the basics. So that’s exactly what I did and continue to do. And since this time, I am no longer afraid to fail. We have to stop being afraid to fail or redefine or rethink that word because daring to dream and daring to risk or take the leap can bring so much positive and beautiful things as so much can come from failure if we evolve, grow, and move on to the next dream incorporating lessons learned.

So I’m still a pusher. I just push in different ways. I push for people, including myself first and foremost, to take Nehemiah’s story and the poem to heart. To constantly ask how this approach would play out for each mission trip and in everyday ministry and life? I’ve come to find for me and I hope for many it is pushing to stop and listen allowing people to truly be heard, the pushing to always put people and relationships before task, and the pushing to accomplish the work together. It is a paradigm shift in mission trips to living out a mission of being not only abroad but also in everyday life. I have witnessed how this is what transforms ministry, transforms relationships, and transforms lives.