Mud Bricks and Cobra Snakes
Building a Chicken House in Mozambique
This is a story about mud bricks and cobras and how this relates to following your passion.
I grew up on a small farm thirty minutes inland of Byron Bay. I am now a filmmaker but before that I studied building design and a long time before that I was a 4-year-old who preferred to spend time on my father's farm helping to build the family home rather than go to childcare and that's where I think my interest in building design was born.
Fast forward 25 years and I finished my studies and was in need of a break and an adventure. I was seeking an alternative way of thinking about buildings from the steel, brick and timber houses that are so common in Australia.
So I called up my sister who was travelling through southern Africa at the time and she invited me to join her. She promised that we would see some local mud brick architecture and a giraffe or three. So I set off.
Namibia, South Africa, several game parks and a journey of giraffes later and I arrived at the edge of Lake Nyasa in southern Mozambique, waved goodbye to my sister and started down the long dirt road to the Manda Wilderness Project - a conservation project focused on providing models of alternative farming methods.
Here I learned with my skills in building design that I would be in charge of constructed a mud brick house for the resident chickens. To put this into context my friends were working on high rises, apartment blocks and mansions so this isn’t exactly what I envisioned for my first project but it was a start and the the chickens needed it.
The chickens were bullied by baboons and chased by cobras to the extent that the farm managers had decided that they needed a fortress to live in. Their house had no windows, no natural light and no natural ventilation more like a prison than a home. Quite understandably they hadn't laid eggs in several months. Some blamed the house others blamed the rooster.
So how do you build a mud brick home in Mozambique. We did it the same way all houses are constructed in this area. Take your lead from the local termites. They knew that for a strong building structure you needed mud with a high clay to sand ratio. This made our job easy as all we had to do was search out an unused termite mound, excavate some earth, add some water and we had the materials we needed.
This was a revelation to me coming from Australia where materials would travel thousands of kilometres and sometimes all the way from overseas. How amazing to have all the materials only a short walk from the site. So a couple of hundred bricks later and we were putting the last mud render onto the walls to protect the bricks from the rain and adding the thatch roof.
This is when disaster struck - just before the chickens were going to be moved to their new home. It was like something out of a horror movie. In the middle of the night a cobra snake had worked out how to infiltrate the chicken house fortress and bit the rooster on its wattle (the small bit of skin below the rooster beak). The rooster fell into a coma and in a last ditch attempt to save it the farm managers cut off its wattle. We were all devastated that this was going to be the end and it put a real dampener on the whole chicken house project.
But miraculously two days later the rooster emerged from its coma. We all let out a huge sigh of relief - the house was complete, the chickens were moved in and the rooster had survived the cobra attack.
But that wasn't where the good news ended. Two days later we checked the nesting boxes and the chickens had started laying again. The perfect happy ending to what could have been a tragic story. But one thing that bugged me - was it the decadent new mud brick house or cobra-infused rooster that had inspired the chickens to lay again? I guess I’ll never know.
As I sat on the flight home I reflected on the experience. How great it was to see a more local approach to building design that used the most readily available materials. And above all how following your passion can lead you to the most strange and wonderful experiences.
By David Jones