Plastering involves a lot of poo

At 4 am, my body woke me up again to use the outhouse. My body is still on east coast time and thinks that it's 7 am. Thankfully, I was able to fall back asleep until 6 when my alarm woke me up to get ready for my daily chore: helping with breakfast. You can tell who the morning people are: we all volunteered for breakfast or coffee duties.

We started this morning's workshop by finishing the cob walls that we'd been working on yesterday. Today, we even placed a glass block on our crawlspace wall and cobbed it into place. 

At lunch, I caught a ride with another participant into town to the general store to pick up some wet wipes. Today has been the first day that the rain stopped and the sun came out! Not yet warm enough for me to jump in a lake to clean off, though. Even though last night I stuffed paper in my water soaked boots, the remaining wet still soaked through my two layers of socks.

In the afternoon, we started plastering. Plaster is a mix of clay, sand and manure. All the manure that I sifted yesterday was now ready for use. In a blue barrel drum, we poured in 3 parts sand, 1 part clay, 1 part manure, a yogurt container of "gloop" (fermenting clay and manure) and some water. The host had a large paddle blade for her drill to mix it into plaster.

Holding her hawk in one hand, our instructor ladled a scoop of plaster onto her hawk. Then picking up her trowel, she scooped a section onto her house and smoothed it with the trowel. She made it look so effortless! After explaining her process and demonstrating a bit more with the trowel, we were split up into teams to plaster various walls around the house. I worked with four other participants to plaster the interior of the root cellar. The plaster mixture was fine and gooey. We'd grab a handful and smear the manure mixture upward on the wall. Then we'd take a yogurt lid and smooth it out. Another participant was an expert in the smoothing, as she used to make automobile clay models. There was plaster everywhere: on our gloves, dripping down our arms, falling on the styrofoam on which we were kneeling, collecting at the bottom of the walls. All I could think of was all the manure everywhere and if I was taking enough precautions to stay sanitary. It is tough with only composting toilets and a blue barrel drum of water for handwashing

When we finished, some other participants were nice enough to ask me to the beach with them to wash some clothes. It was glorious to wade in the water with the blue sky and puffy clouds. Equally glorious was the chance to wash out my sun sleeves and leg warmers that were dirty with plaster. Returning to camp, we hung up our clothes to dry. Although being how shady and damp it always is, nothing seems to be drying.

Supper was another delicious meal: beet salad with roasted nuts, Jasmine rice and urad dal. Afterward, anither participant and I hiked up to the sunset lookout. The view was spectacular even though it was still too cloudy to see any sunset.