Making a home, Honduran (Rural) Style

This year, while working in San Buenaventura (near Gualaco), I had the opportunity to do a lot of "mudding", or as the Hondurans call it, pegando tierra. I usually don't do room additions or house construction because most of our projects have been putting in cement floors and latrines. However, pegando tierra is my favorite job of all because it resembles working with clay (for those of you who are artists).

One day, while working on a house, I started to ask one of the elderly men there how long it took to make a house from start to finish, and what all was required to do it. I had heard in the past, when working in other aldeas, that pegando tierra was a "woman's job", so I also asked him if he had helped to make his own house. He told me that in his aldea, women and men always worked together to build a house, and that it took approximately one to three months to complete. The first part of the job was to find a place to build your house. In Olancho you can claim land as your own, and if no one objects with-in a certain time frame, you can keep it. After choosing a place to build a home, they go up into the mountains to get 3 types of wood. One is used for the frame of the house, which includes the four corner posts, the posts for the doorway, and the posts to support the roof. The second type of wood is used to make the grid that they create for the construction of the walls. the third types is used to tie each place where two pieces of wood cross over each other. This, he explained, took the most time.

After creating the frame, they would put the roof on, which is usually made of tin these days. In the past it would have been a thatch roof. This is necessary to keep the walls out of the rain as they dry. To create the walls, the couple would get a clay-like substance that they have in certain parts of their terrain, and mix it with water. This creates the "mud" that they pack into the grid to make walls. This can also take a significant amount of time, especially when there are only two people doing it. However, when we work in large groups with the residents, we usually finish in two days.