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The following is another excerpt from the story of our travels to Burkina Faso. Read along as we brave the Metro in Paris, become red with African Dust in Burkina Faso, and climb rickety ladders to reach rooftops. Our intent? To learn more about Earth Roofs in the Sahel and to see for ourselves the life-changing effect of this program. If you’re reading for the first time, you can see the other entries here.

I am torn, now, because I have so many bits to write about and not enough space. I want to tell you all about the experience of being in Burkina Faso, the way the light was at every time of day, the sound of the peoples’ voices, the singing. But I also want to tell you about the houses and the vaults and the masons, the incredible sight of earth being transformed into shelter. Bear with me. I will try to share it all.

After Jessie and Cindy and I finish our lunch with the Youlou family, we set out on foot, on our first vault-scouting trip. Our guides are Francis, Secretary for AVN in Boromo, and Laure and Gaelle, the two French interns. Moctar, our translator from Mali, and Zalissa, Secretary for AVN in Ouagadougu, come with us. We make a happy and diverse party of people, wandering across dusty fields in areas unknown to most of us, except for Francis, who never wavers as he guides us.

We pass a woman drawing water out of a well, and children playing, and a little flock of goats who follow us for awhile. A woman riding with a bundle of sticks on a cart pulled by a donkey passes by swiftly, and smiles as she goes. The sun is hot and high. Our water is tepid. We chat with Moctar as we walk, and in his self-deprecating way he fills us in, bit by bit, on the landscape around us, on the problems of Africa, and on houses we see.

I make the mistake at one point, of asking how many West African dialects there are. “No dialects!” he says, “they are not dialects! They are languages. A dialect is something like the difference between the way English is spoken in America and Scotland. There are thousands of individual languages in Africa.”

Moctar himself speaks seven languages. Zalissa, Burkinabe born and raised, speaks three, and is learning English rapidly. I once again feel ignorant, with my one fluent language and bits and pieces of a few others. And when I say bits and pieces, I mean bits and pieces.

After walking for several hours and seeing different sites, we come upon a large home with a gated courtyard. Homes here appear to be built without any need for roads close by, and I look around and marvel at the way this house seems to be in the middle of a plain. It is beautiful. After walking through tiny clusters of homes with sheet metal roofs, this house seems tall and impressive. Jessie asks who it belongs to, and Moctar tells us that it is the home of a French man who is married to a Burkinabe woman.

The market for the AVN method homes is two-tiered, in a way. On one hand, there is a program and push to see impoverished people in small villages living in homes that are better suited to their needs and comfort. This is gaining speed, and we saw many of these modest homes in villages. On the other hand, there are sometimes wealthier people, or non-nationals who are looking for a way to build a hotel or restaurant, and in employing the AVN masons to craft the Voûte Nubienne buildings, they are gaining a better quality product as well as sowing directly into the Burkina economy. The materials are local and the labor is local, which is practically revolutionary anywhere in the world, these days.

There are two buildings in the courtyard. The smaller one is the home of the people who own this property, (they aren’t home at the moment, but we are welcomed anyways) and the larger will be a small hotel in the future. The buildings have the beautiful curved look of earth built homes, with triangular decorations along the top edges. We walk to the back and up a set of stairs to see a room on the small second floor.

Here is another attribute of the vault method roofs; the ability to build a second floor. When the brick buildings are made, they progress in the large, regular sized bricks up to a certain point. This work is fairly easy (as easy goes- have you ever made a building with your hands with brick and mortar? I congratulate you if you have) and a family could do it, if they were only able to afford the masons for the roof. Then the smaller, thinner bricks are used to form the vault, with a cable guide used to insure a precise arch. At this point, when everything is dry, buttresses can be built by raising the outer walls until they are level with the top of the vault and filling the space between with plain earth, providing a flat surface on which another story could be built. In this way, houses can be expanded in the future, if a family grows or simply desires more space. (If you want to read more about AVN construction methods, you can find their description here.)

As we wrap up our tour, we wander outside the gate and watch a mason at work. Moctar tells Cindy that he is pouring the Karité oil onto the mud in order to apply another water proof coating of mud to the walls of the building. Karité oil comes from the Karité tree (we know it as the Shea tree in the West) which bears a small almond-like fruit, and is used to make salves for the skin that we call Shea butter. The off water of this product is used by AVN masons, who mix it with mud to produce a water tight finish that does not crack in the rains and heat. We watch the mason for a while-he is sweet and patient when I want to film him working-as he lifts the heavy pail and pours this water on the mud. It is a soothing process, the circular motions, and I have the feeling that we are watching an artist at work with his medium-earth.