SB: Kelly Lerner's Y2k+1 China Report #3: City and Countryside (FWD)

[Robert W Tom <archilogic@juno.com>]

Please respond to klerner@one-world-design only.
 
Ni Hao all,
In the city center here, Tang Yuan County seems to be all about brick,
coal 
and non-stop construction. Practicing Chi Gung each morning in our fourth

floor glassed in porch, I see five brick apartment blocks going up (at
the 
rate of a story every 3 days) , four large cranes with red flags flying
at 
each end lifting concrete and mortar,  no less than ten large, round
brick 
smoke stacks about 12' diameter at the bottom over eight stories high and
a 
cell phone tower.
 
There's only crisp, clear blue sky at the top of the smoke stacks this 
morning, but my nose wrinkles involuntarily as sulfur-rich coal smoke
wafts 
in on the breeze occasionally from chimneys of the row of one story brick

houses tucked in next to our five story apartment block.
 
We look down directly into their courtyard - a pacing German Shepherd
(not 
common to see such large dogs here), a small vegetable garden with greens

and green onions, potted aloe plants, stockpiled red roof tiles, laundry 
flapping in the breeze and a family going about their morning teeth 
brushing and face washing .
 
In the distance it sounds as though an English bobby is having trouble 
controlling a busy intersection - constantly blowing his metal whistle.
The 
whistle comes closer and I fear that some frenzied elementary school gym 
teacher is roaming the streets. Finally a backwards tricycle cart (two 
wheels on the front) rolls into view with a huge loaf of tofu and 
plastic 
soda bottles filled with hot soy milk. The whistle, clamped securely in
the 
merchant's mouth, peals with each breath out. She stops at each
restaurant, 
and also for suit-clad, cell phone-toting apartment dwellers that walk
down 
and meet her on the street, cutting a block off the loaf and weighing it
on 
a beam scale.
 
We completed training on Friday and our six straw-bale teams returned to 
their home villages in Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Liao Ning and Heilongjiang 
provinces, each with their own design, ready to begin their foundations. 
While they start building, Amy, Paul and I will map out an illustrated 
training manual based on the training and Chinese designs that have
evolved 
over the last four years. Amy drew diagrams furiously throughout the 
training and will be taking digital photos to illustrate each phase of 
construction and then laying the whole thing out.
 
I'm accustomed to doing this alone and it's refreshing and reassuring to 
have both of them here - Paul to bounce around construction details with 
and Amy to pull together the manual. For a rest on Saturday, we all took 
off to the nearby forested hills which eventually roll into Siberia. 
Traveling with them is like seeing China through new eyes.
 
After getting all the requisite stamped slips of tissue-paper-thin 
permissions, we took off in two red taxis. Weaving between bicycles,
horse 
carts, tiny bread-box taxi vans, tractors pulling carts, walking
tractors, 
bicycle carts, blue 2-ton trucks, bicycle rickshaws and pedestrians we
made 
our way out of town. Less than four blocks from our apartment, the five
and 
two story buildings gave way to one story brick houses with red tile
roofs. 
Right along the railroad tracks we passed the coal yard - a pile at least

two acres and 20 feet high. Men with shovels were loading coal into blue 
trucks and onto donkey carts. It costs 150 RMB/tonne (2200 lbs.) - about
84 
cents per 100 lbs. Our new little straw-bale houses reduce coal use by 
about 50% (to less than 2 tonnes/winter), but the attached brick, steel
and 
plastic greenhouses use 10 tonnes per winter. We're working on a
straw-bale 
version.
 
Just a kilometer beyond the coal yard, our road broke free from the rows
of 
brick houses and the view opened up to miles and miles of bottom land
rice 
paddies. The road itself was lined with irrigation canals and poplar
trees 
with the first four feet of trunk painted white. I've seen this all over 
China, but never gotten a good explanation - maybe it's just a government

policy? Most of the paddies were already planted with four inch high 
sprouts poking up out of the water in neat rows.
 
Occasionally, a cluster of bicycles leaned against the poplars and lay on

the ground. Out in the field, a  family, ankle-deep in water and muck, 
leaned over nearly double, planting rice sprouts along string lines. They

grabbed the sprouts from six inch clusters placed by a man wielding a 
basket full. He carried them from the seed beds where they had germinated

under hoops of split bamboo and thick plastic of a blue-ish hue. Some of 
the germination beds are close to the fields, but I'd seen them all over 
Tang Yuan. The rice is sometimes germinated on woven plastic bags, the 
sprouts rolled up like turf and the rolls transported to the fields by
cart.
 
It was all quite picturesque, but I just kept thinking about how much
labor 
goes into the bowl of rice I eat each night. Each family makes about 3000

RMB each year on rice - about USD$ 375. It's tough for family farmers 
everywhere... I guess the 300 RMB that a family can save on coal (in a SB

house) is economically significant.
 
Only two more days left in Tang Yuan county, then it's on to Harbin to
meet 
with code officials about developing a straw-bale building code. On
Friday 
we're off to Beijing and home for me while Paul and Amy go on to Mongolia

for a short vacation. They'll be back to do hands-on training at all the 
different sites in June. We're all loving China and homesick at the same 
time - a strange combination of enjoyment and culture shock. I think of
my 
friends back home often and appreciate your thoughts and support.
 
Until nest time,
 
Kelly
  
Great accomplishments are possible with attention to small beginnings. - 
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
======================================================
Kelly Lerner
One World Design, Design and Consulting
925 Avis Drive
El Cerrito, California, 94530, USA
klerner@one-world-design.com     <http://www.one-world-design.com>
510-525-8582 phone, 510-528-8763 fax
======================================================
                       End of Forwarded Material 
(JPG Images of TofuLady, Rice Planting & Horsecart <snipped> to 
 conserve bandwidth. )


                ===    *     ===
Robert  W. Tom          Kanata, Ontario, Canada       
Rob_Tom@ErehwonDesignGroup.intranets.com 

please visit:  http://www.theHungerSite.com daily
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