I’ve been corresponding with a long time reader about how to develop low cost natural building training courses. The idea is to provide a range of free and low cost training materials that instructors can choose from to develop training programs for students. Kelly and I have already made a pretty good start with our videos, free plans, online articles, blog posts and Instructables. Some of these are listed below for ease of reference. These free materials could be supplemented with my low cost Earthbag Building Guide and/or DVD.
Education
Interns Wanted for International Aid Work
“Who learns skills for free? Interns who assist aid organizations.
Learn and serve in the US only or here and overseas as well. Build Simple Inc. offers free training in construction and design of geo-textile buildings like earthbag and straw wattle or techniques like Ubuntu-blox that use agricultural waste or plastic trash.
Two weeks of training near Albuquerque, NM is being scheduled for early July, with repeat dates in September. Help BSI to advance building knowledge about alternative techniques while you learn. Builders, photographers, building designers, and service team leaders can all contribute needed skills. Engineers and engineering students are especially needed to test structures- ask about donating a day or getting involved in an ongoing study.
Earthbag Building in Kenya
We are always pleased to hear from people around the world about their building projects. I recently received this email, along with several photos:
“Dear Kelly I have seen your inspiring works with earthbags and am happy to inform you that I am also into green building here in Kenya. I have done a demo house using earthbags and will be going for the next level of building as an eco-friendly training school using this method. We would want to include off grid power eventually, but that is for the future. Regards, Barry Kungu”
Sustainable Building Networks
Do you have a sustainable building network in your area? If you do, it will make the process of building with alternative materials much easier. These networks pull together all sorts of key information to guide people through the building process. Here’s an example of a sustainable building network I stumbled across in India called the Rural Housing Knowledge Network (RHKN)
Ark Soaring in the Sky
Kikuma Watanabe is an associate professor at Kochi University of Technology in Japan and is responsible for the overall design of this project. The owner is Kagayaku Inochi (glorious life), a Japanese NPO. This school for orphans is in Sangkhlaburi village, Thailand, located near the borderline between Thailand and Myanmar. In this area there are a lot of poor people who immigrated from Myanmar. This school aims to provide sustainable poverty alleviation in the area.
To provide a good future for the children, they hoped that the school would be designed to realize their dreams. So, at first the teacher asked the children to draw the dream of the school building. One of them drew a flying ship as his dream. They adapted his idea, and tried to translate the drawing into architecture.
New FAQ’s at Earthbagbuilding.com
The Frequently Asked Questions section of www.earthbagbuilding.com has been accumulating pertinent questions and answers for over a decade. These had been categorized into only about a half dozen pages, which had become overly long and cumbersome for finding specific information. I finally decided to organize them in such a way that it is now much … Read more