Winter is not so cold here near the equator, but the slightly shorter days a lack of rain mean that most rice fields around here are asleep for the season. However, the fields are not silent, farmers still head out every morning to mold the soil and cultivate the land, their product: bricks.

Yes, there are cities made of wood, and others made of concrete, but Tana is mostly a city of bricks. And the bricks don’t come from a home improvement store or a big corporation… most come from regular farmers who dig up the clay from their rice paddies, pack it into squares, and fire it in makeshift furnaces made from last year’s bricks.

I’m not too fond of the smoke I encounter when I run along the paddies in the morning, but it doesn’t pollute the city the same way the brick production puts a cloud over Kathmandu. And hey, who can fault these farmers for trying to get a little more profit from their land? Supposedly the bricks sell for around .01USD apiece, but I guess it adds up, no?