Even a wealthy country couldn’t build many schools if cement cost $40 a bag, which is the going rate in the remote village of Kato on Guyana’s remote southeastern savanna. As a result, local school construction plans were going nowhere.
The problem was transport. No roads or even rivers connect this area to the coast.
Nearly everybody and everything that goes in and out of these Amerindian communities must travel by charter flights. It costs more than $1 per kilo to ship cargo where there are proper airstrips, more where there are not.
So when the IDB-financed SIMAP Amerindian Program agreed to pay for the construction of a new primary school in Kato, concrete construction was out of the question. Carolyn Rodrigues, coordinator of the SIMAP program, took on the challenge. She had seen a couple of old buildings in Kato made of fired brick. “If they have bricks, they must have clay,” she thought.
Moreover, it turned out that local community members once made their own bricks. So back in the capital of Georgetown, Rodrigues and IDB social sector specialist Baudouin Duquesne came up with a proposal to reintroduce this craft to the area. Then, she and community members designed a project to reintroduce brickmaking to young men in Kato and four surrounding communities. With a supply of bricks, SIMAP could finance construction projects like schools, health clinics and community centers at a much lower cost. Moreover, homeowners could afford to replace their crumbly adobe houses.
SIMAP brought trainers to Kato from a couple of Amerindian towns 200 kilometers to the south. Students from Kato’s four neighboring communities had to find accommodations during the two-month training period. Because they were not earning any income for their families during this time, SIMAP agreed to pay the trainees a small stipend.
During the first month, the students learned how to find clay, make molds, form bricks and dry them, build a kiln, stack and fire the bricks, and pack them. One student quit in the middle of the training period to get married, but postponed his honeymoon to complete the course. The second month trainees built a demonstration project: a health clinic requested by the community.
The training course cost a total of $18,000, including the health clinic. The only material cost for making the bricks was caustic soda, which is used to keep the clay from sticking to the wooden forms.
In December 1999, 24 of the 25 men who started the training course graduated at a ceremony held in a small warehouse near Kato’s landing strip attended by Rodrigues and Robert Kestell, the IDB’s representative to Guyana. Before the graduation certificates were handed out, Patrick Gomes, the head trainer, told the trainees: “The project’s success depends on if you return to your villages and put into practice what you learned. You are going back to your villages as leaders.”