The Business of Molding Bricks

Molding bricks is dirty business. Take off your shoes, roll up your pants and sleeves, and step into the mud pit. With bare hands sling fistfuls of mud into the simple wooden molds, packing it in with your fists. Then carry the mold to dry ground, turn it over and slowly pull it off the newly formed brick. After repeating this dozens of time you are coated in mud up to your knees and elbows, as well as having mud splattered over your face and everywhere else.
Molding bricks is vital business. Virtually every hut in Malawi is made from hand-made mud bricks molded and fired by the local villagers. No bricks-no homes.
Molding bricks is family business. There is something about working alongside others in a mud pit that transforms strangers into brothers and sisters. You simply cannot help but love one another when you are covered with mud, singing hymns, and making the bricks that will become a preschool and clinic for orphans and vulnerable children. We laughed and even danced together at times in the pit-mixing the mud, and sharing our lives.
Molding bricks is really about molding lives. As the strangers from New Jersey worked alongside the villagers of Sakata, more was being formed than simple mud bricks. Lives were being changed, friendships made, the foundation of an enduring relationship between villages was beginning. We were forming a partnership with people who in so many ways couldn’t be more different. But when you work in a mud pit, after a while, everyone looks the same.
The team from New Jersey were, for some of the villagers, the first “azungu” (white people), they ever saw. For all of the villagers we were the first azungus they ever saw molding bricks. As we worked together under the African sun, we sensed that we were really the ones being molded and shaped by the unseen hands of the One who creates family from strangers, community from chaos and hope from despair.
In a few months the bricks we molded will be part of a simple building for the youngest villagers to come and receive basic medical care and preschool instruction. It will be the focal point of our future work in these 14 villages. We only helped to mold a few of the 150,000 bricks needed to construct the building. But in the few days we worked together, so much more was made than mud bricks. The team from Allentown, and the villagers of Sakata were molded into a new kind of community-the kind that comes from the dirty, glorious business of molding bricks.

Julius, the One Who Is Left

I cannot let go of Julius. Neither can Terra. He is in my thoughts often. I know he visits Terra as well. There are times throughout the day when Terra will lean against me and whisper his name in my ear and smile. She knows that I love him as much as she does. Well, maybe she loves him a bit more. But we have both been taken by him.

Perhaps it’s because we were there, at Open Arms Orphanage, the day he first arrived. He sat up against the wall, his large brown eyes filled with anxiety, fear, loss. He sat so still, plastered against the wall, watching, listening to all that surrounded him. It was nearing 5:00. The “mothers” had started to gather the toddlers for dinner. One of the mothers scooped him up, gently slid him into a high chair and placed a bowl of porridge on his tray. He sat there quietly, his eyes darting around the room.
And then the dam broke. He began to cry. The flood gates opened. His cries turned to sobs. Terra tried to feed him. She gently rubbed his head. He was unconsolable. He just cried and cried. Another volunteer, an older woman from Holland, picked him up and held him tightly, rocking him back and forth, whispering in his little ear. Oh - we all felt so badly for him.

The matron told us a bit of his story. Both parents are dead. He was being raised by his 12 year old sister. There are no other relatives. The matron pulled his shirt up over his back. Down from his shoulders runs a long set of railroad tracks, a huge scar left from spinal tuberculosis. He was nearly two but not yet walking. Apparently he had spent most of his tiny years in bed. - He was a sorrowful sight.

With a little bit of attention and love, Julius is now thriving at Open Arms Orphanage. Yet I cannot seem to let go of him. Maybe it is because we were there the first day he arrived. Maybe it is because he is exceptionally bright. Everyone comments on how brilliant the little guy is. He is sharp. Maybe it is because we know he has no one who will eventually take him home. Most of the children at Open Arms have some relative who regularly comes to visit them and will eventually take them back to the village. Julius has no one. I don’t know, but Terra and I have been smitten.

The last few times we have been there, he cries when we leave. Our hearts break as we peel his fingers from our necks and push him back inside to stay behind the closed doors. Much to Terra’s disappointment, the idea of adopting him does not seem to make sense to me for many reasons. Yet I have another idea. --- What if we can find a family, a Malawian family from our church over here, a family whom we know, who will adopt and raise him. Perhaps we can be involved some way, maybe offer to help pay school expenses. I have been thinking about this idea for several weeks now and tonight I asked Stephen what he thought of the idea. He embraced it with as much passion as I have. I thank God.