Kiko Denzer : More hands digging in the Dirt: a collection of stories

Some of Roberto Monge's family at the table near the oven

Roberto Monge’s father – Alfredo Del Transito Monge Menjivar – grew up dirt poor in a jungle village in El Salvador, one of 8 surviving children in a family of 14. By good luck and hard work, he earned a law degree, found paying work, got married and started a family. I didn’t know him, but according to his son Roberto, the elder Monge felt indebted to his campesino roots; when he had to choose between a military dictatorship or a revolutionary people’s movement, he chose the latter, later assuming the position of Attorney General of the Poor in the revolutionary government. His position made him a target. He fled for his life. Two weeks later, his friend Oscar Romero (also his parish priest and the Archbishop of El Salvador), was assassinated. (Raúl Juliá tells some of Romero’s story in a movie by the same name – the first major film financed by the Catholic Church, and a story central to current events). After leaving his beloved country, the elder Monge sent his family to the US, but after a few years as an expat diplomat for the revolution, he realized that he had to choose family or country. He chose family, and moved to the states to be with his wife and kids.

Roberto and son

What does this have to do with ovens? Roberto Monge left El Salvador in 1980, on his 8^th birthday. With his parent’s help, he grew up to claim a piece of the American Dream, getting an education and work, starting his own family, and buying a home in San Luis Obispo. But his father had always (even “before it was cool to be an urban farmer”) tended a backyard patch of corn, squash, and tomatoes. Roberto also remembered the dirt from El Salvador. After digging out from a flood, he recognized the same feel and color in his San Luis Obisbo backyard, and decided to introduce his kids to a part of their heritage. They started making adobes. Then he remembered the food, which had been baked in a wood-fired mud oven. They built a mini-oven. They got help and friends, and built a full-sized oven.

Roberto's son & daughter with mini-oven

A local writer recognized it as a story worth telling, and published it in Slo Life Magazine. I’m sharing it here, with permission, because it tells the deeper story of ovens, one that we all share, somewhere, somehow, even if it’s hidden. I also think it’s important – very important – to remember that what hides such stories are invariably experiences that have displaced us from our roots, from the simple sources of our food and familial and communal relations. I think we all share those stories, too.

The most interesting thing about writing Build Your Own Earth Oven, and continuing to work with dirt as a building material, is how the material itself – just dirt, and water – seems to revive common stories, common memories, and common joys. I find hope in that, and hope shared is hope doubled. (Be sure to look at the recipe for El Salvadorean quesadilla which follows the article!

When I asked Roberto to look at this introduction, he mentioned in his reply that an elder aunt from the village accompanied his cousin to his 40^th birthday party. “She was so happy to see El Hornito in use. She just loved the Quesadilla that came out and she said ‘Este hombre hace una quesadilla mejor que una mujer’ (this man makes a better quesadilla than a woman) – It was a very high compliment.  Although my father couldn’t enjoy my quesadilla it was great to have some of the elders give their nod of approval.  She was so happy to see the tradition continued and she told me stories about her mom’s Hornito.”

Below is the story as printed in SloLife Magazine. Here, too, is a link to Jordan (Hosea) at ncredible edibles, the oven builder, who Roberto credits not only for making the oven beautiful, but also for helping to make it into a community project.

Roberto has since added a little cast-iron chimenea to make use of leftover coals and keep folks warm while they eat on chilly evenings. The base was made of earth bags.

Roberto's oven; nice greens!

about 300 pounds of masonry makes a small space comfortable for 10-24 hours on very little fuel. It's also hard to make it burn dirty – within minutes of ignition, there's no visible smoke from the stack, and you never damp it down.

This little heater hat has worked superbly! I think it’s a great do-it-yourself option for anyone interested in turning their box stove into a much more efficient, cleaner heater for their home or shop. However, I’m reluctant to publish formal plans or how-to info as I’ve built just a couple of heaters, and I consider this one to be an experimental prototype. (If you’re inspired to try something of your own, take good care; be sure to include a better clean-out design that what I allowed for here, and send photos!)

A heater in the home poses serious risks — potentially much greater than what you’d expect of an outdoor oven. That said, it’s not rocket science; masonry heaters were developed and designed by amateurs — people who work for love, not money (for the whole story, look up David Lyle’s Book of Masonry Stoves: Rediscovering an Old Way of Warming).

The videos below are the best explanation I can offer for how I did it. In addition, I’d recommend you look up the Masonry Heater Association, and Alex Chernow’s website. Alex has been developing bell stove designs, and has links to a Russian heater builder who makes brilliant sense of the theory, which is really just flow — think funnels full of water, then turn ‘em upside down and re-envision the water as hot gases. Everything goes from there.

The big trick, I think, really has to do with getting bricks and mortar right, especially if you’re only building a heater that’s a single brick thick. The goal is to limit (even prevent!) cracks in the masonry that could compromise function and/or safety (I do have some cracks in mine, but they don’t seem to be causing harm. I am planning on doing some maintenance/examination, but not until the heating season is over.)

If you build something like this, again, please do take notes and pix, and please share! I would love to publish a collection of stories from folks who have successfully done it themselves — that’s authoritative in a much more important way — taking responsibility for one’s own experiments, as well as one’s own heat…

David S. Cargo, who assembles info about community ovens for the St. Paul Bread Club sent me a link about Lily Gordon, a remarkable young woman, now 16, who has been helping villagers in Tanzania to build ovens so they can make their own bread (previously, bread had to be transported from so far that it would often be inedible when it arrived).

At the age of 11, Lily Gordon started raising funds for the village of Shirati, Tanzania. For her 11th birthday, instead of gifts, she asked her friends to bring money for the children of Shirati. The party raised $1,300. Behind Lily are many others, particularly a woman named Christine Nyanda Chacha, a Tanzanian woman who decided that lack of parents and money didn’t need to prevent her from going to school, getting a degree, moving to America, and becoming a teacher in Berkeley — where she sought ways to help her students think past the bounds of affluence and entitlement (for more of this story, click here). Lily is just one of many students who have had this experience, thanks to Ms. Nyanda Chacha. Watch the video to hear Lily tell the story:

Rainer Warzecha (at left), with fellow builders in Jähringe, Sweden, in 2008. "Gertrud, who lives there, was a super cook and host. We had fine meals. Gertrud still fires the oven and loves it. We had a holiday with our first daughter there, a year later."

Some years ago now, I got an unexpected email from Elke Cole, a German-born architect now living in Canada, whom I had originally met at the first Natural Building Colloquium in Oregon, in the mid 90s. Elke was traveling in Germany, where she’d come across a public art project in a park in Berlin. It was full of earthen sculptures made by a German artist named Rainer Warzecha. At the time, I was collecting stories and photos to expand a little pamphlet about earthen art projects (Dig Your Hands in the Dirt). But most of what I had were small scale projects: benches, ovens, and things made with kids in schools. Rainer’s, however, was huge! Not only was it at the center of a major urban park/playground, it was the focus of an annual week of public art and mud work – a modern incarnation of traditional village-building, with Rainer as “arch tecton,” literally, the “head builder.” I sent an email asking if I could include some photos of his work in my book, and got a quick reply – in English! (I was grateful, not having any German myself.) Not only did Rainer send wonderful photos, stories, and inspiration, he also provided apt and timely advice regarding my layout and design for the book. More recently, he helped Ian Miller with feedback on the German edition of Build Your Own Earth Oven. I still haven’t met him, but Rainer continues his work in various areas, including oven-building, and has a website in both English and German. It’s about time I said a proper word of thanks.

Rainer, working in Lübeck, 2009, building with a class of a secondary school students. "They were very enthusiastic and the whole process was a lot of fun. Especially the first fire in the oven made them jump around; it's always magic with the element of fire."

 

Ready to make the first, or thermal layer. Note the roof model in foreground.

Ian Miller with his baby daughter Iantha in front of one of his ovens

Ian’s Miller’s oven story (adapted from his translator’s note for the German edition of Build Your Own Earth Oven):

I saw my first earthen oven in Santa Cruz, California, where I was studying Agroecology. The fellow student who built it had a small bread business selling bread that he baked in it. My studies in Santa Cruz led to an internship on a biodynamic farm in Austria and there I got to know whole-grain sourdough bread and learned to bake it. I eventually learned that this bread was best out of a wood-fired oven but since I had never built anything in my life at that point, I couldn’t imagine affording or building a brick oven myself. Then I happened upon Kiko’s book and it quickly became clear that this was something I could do myself!

At that point I was in Iowa with my wife Andrea, who is from Linz, Austria (we met at the farm where I’d interned). We started telling people about our dreams: to build an oven, grow grains by hand (I’m a passionate scythe mower and even trained with the Austrian Scythe Association), baking Austrian-style bread and selling it at farmers market to make a meager living. An older homesteading couple said they’d like to see that happen at their place, so we moved there and built our first oven, which took us a month. There was a lot of rain and flooding that year, so I used sand that the floods left behind and gravel that washed off the roads into the ditch. I built the foundation out of limestone that crumbled off of roadside outcroppings. This 32.5” oven cost about 50 dollars, the only expense being the firebrick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We quickly started making test batches of bread and just giving it away. When we were confident that we could reliably make good bread, we opened our stand. This was the last open question: would Americans in a small town in Iowa want to buy our bread, the likes of which they’d probably never seen before? Well, the first week we sold out and eventually we almost couldn’t bake enough bread to meet demand. The most we ever baked on baking day was 50 1.5 pound loaves on three bakes with one firing. The first load was done in 20 minutes, the second in 45, the third in a little over an hour. They sold out at 5 bucks a pop.

I’ve now built about ten ovens, four of which were built in workshops that I gave. Together with my wife I’ve also built a balecob cabin for ourselves and I’ve worked on several other earthen buildings. Andrea’s also built a small cob rocket cooker, a cob bench and a straw/cob sweatlodge. A few short years ago, we had never built anything, but through Kiko’s book, we realized that anything was possible with natural materials. Reading Build Your Own Earth Oven took my life in a new direction and even pointed the way towards a new way of nourishing my body that has helped me overcome chronic digestive problems.

My point here is not to brag, but rather to tell you what has been made possible to me through this book and will hopefully be possible for you too. This book changed my life and it is an honor and a pleasure to be able to offer it to the German-speaking world.

The cover of the new German edition (and my lovely wife Hannah in Canada before we met!)

Out of the blue one day I got a phone call from a guy named Ian Miller. He said he had built a few ovens, baked a fair amount of bread, was married to an Austrian and (among other things) interested in translating Build Your Own Earth Oven into German. With that began an adventure that is now resulting in a new (German!) edition of the book, published by Stocker Verlag, out of Austria (they also publish Austrian permaculturist Sepp Holzer, which makes it even more of an honor). Very interesting to let go of the book and let someone else take it all apart and put it all back together again in a language I can’t read or speak. But in the process of doing it, I realize there are some good stories I haven’t yet shared — not about translation and books, but about ovens and their people. So, while it’s late (especially in terms of giving credit where it’s due for previous projects) I hope this will be a start.

Starting with the most recent (and hoping for a chance to profile each person in greater detail), folks and their stories include:

Ian, who not only translated the book, but got the whole project going.

Rainer Warzecha, an artist and builder in Germany who has helped with the translating, and also contributed photos and stories of his wonderful work in Berlin’s Britzer Garden for Dig Your Hands in the Dirt. His website is www.interglotz.de – worth looking at!

Hendrik Lepel, a German born builder and jack of many trades who’s building ovens and teaching mostly out of ireland, and who read the German text. His website is bakehus.com

Holger Laerad, a Canadian of German heritage, who builds many beautiful things of mud and wood, including ovens, heaters, and more. I don’t think he has a website, but if he does, I’ll get it added on…

And Elke Cole, a German architect and mud-builder living in Canada, whom I’ve known for years now, and who one year sent me amazing photos of amazing mud work in Germany (at Britzer Gardens, which is how I began a correspondence w/Rainer, who not only contributed to but also helped tremendously to improve the layout and design of Dig Your Hands in the Dirt.) Elke spends a lot of time traveling, working and helping in Africa, but also took quite a bit of time, from the sounds of it to help Ian with the translation. More about her and her work at elkecole.com

Thank you thank you thank you all!

more later…

HANDS stands for Housing and Neighborhood Development Services. They work out of Orange, New Jersey to try and reclaim dilapidated houses and other “eyesore properties,” and return them to the neighborhood as affordable homes and community assets. They also work with individual people and neighborhoods, and are creating an Arts District in a former industrial area called the Valley. A recent Google Alert brought in notice of a new community oven they built, and the following story from their quarterly report:

It started as a dream idea of our Executive Director, Pat Morrissy: “Let’s build a community outdoor, wood fired oven where people can bring bread and pizza dough to bake together outside!” The idea caught on and the Earth Oven was begun. A local student of landscape architecture drew a plan, the proprietor of a brick oven pizzeria consulted on the design and a local expert on building with mud scouted the best place to dig for clay soil. The Earth Oven was built by community volunteers of all ages who have taken part in the cement mixing and pouring, constructing the base, mixing the mud with their bare feet, creating the structure with sand and building the dome.

Oven “founders,” from left, are:

Jessica Mathelier

Patricia Rogers

Dan Richer

Molly Rose Kaufman

Anj Ferrara

Stephen Pansci

Jonathan Foster

For more of their marvelous story, go to

• http://www.leadersforcommunities.org/profiles/blogs/hands-that-bake-and-break-bread-together?xg_source=activity
• http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/communal_earth_oven_in_orange.html

• https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1994229349939.2086799.1669614016&type=1

  https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2132343522707.2090253.1669614016&t

2011 has been a year of yurts, w/two opportunities to try out this simple design of sticks and mud — a more permanent adaptation of the traditional, portable, Mongolian design. One was for a friend and neighbor. The other was a workshop at Aprovecho Institute, as part of their sustainable shelter building series. Lots of people helped! Both were made with locally harvested bamboo and fir poles (arranged reciprocally to make a self-supporting, conical roof w/a central skylight, which I’m still trying to figure out how to cover cheaply…) Here’s a little picture book about the whole process. (more…)

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