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.