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WORKING WITH CLAY IN THE SINAI DESERT
On behalf of the Bedouin Tribespeople and the Makhad Trust.
Working overseas in development requires extreme sensitivity to the cultures and values of the hosts.
This stunning lake is the result of a lack of forethought in a major civil engineering project. A new road built across a river bed without any drainage whatsoever.
This is the first time it has rained since the road was built, and it brought a real gift to the nomads of the Sinai Desert.
We had looked in numerous locations and found all sorts of unsuitable silty deposits, before finding the clay being rapidly deposited by the lake. The slabs, nearly 50mm thick were evenly graded from silt below, to a rock hard clay above. The natural cracking had even broken it into convenient sizes to collect.
A few truckloads later and we were in business. You can see the road behind - and the truck is able to drive on the bed of the lake after just four weeks.
The original brief that had brought us to the desert was to design a range of earthbag buildings for the Makhad Trust. The more we looked into this technology, the less we liked it. It relies on barbed wire reinforcement, which in a desert environment could hang around for literally thousands of years, littering the desert and catching at camel's hooves. We experimented with extremely weak mix sand-cement fillings in order to avoid the use of this wire, and then set off to look for something else.
We started with a series of careful experiments, crushing clay...
making a series of sample mixes...
....carefully moulding, recording, and eventually testing to destruction the different blocks.
Within a few days we had a perfect mix for the materials at hand, and within a few weeks production began.
Laying the first blocks took place in an East-meets-West workshop.
The lower courses were backed by a dry-stone wall to resist the occasional torrent of flood water.
The project gets underway.
The building had been conceptualised following some early visits to the peninsular, and was communicated by way of a model - made of clay from the desert.
We became very attached to this remarkable clay, and wanted to see how far it could be taken.
We started with a couple of small clay domes - reinforced with some of the hessian we had brought out to test the idea of earthbag building (and most of which had now found its way into the hands of the nomads). These domes were incredibly strong.
So we devised a concept of a clay shell with a bamboo structure to support the clay whilst it dried.
The palm fibre reinforced clay dome was born. The coarse fibres, taken from the base of the leaves of the date palms at a nearby oasis, provided huge tensile strength, whilst the clay/sand mixture provided good compressive strength.
A test dome 1.5m across and only 30mm thick easily supported the weight of two people!
We are looking to develop this idea to a further stage on our next visit.
see also ....WORKING WITH TENTS