Work is going apace in the construction of a new community centre in Bardala which will serve 13 local Palestinian Bedouin communities. This project is a joint venture between the Jordan Valley Solidarity Committee and ICAHD. On 23rd October, 22 ICAHD volunteers arrived from the Finland, Germany, Italy and the UK arrived to set it in motion during the first three days of its construction. The centre is being built using a design, methods and materials that are traditional to the area and which are ecologically compatible with the environment. Hundreds of adobe (mud) bricks are needed for the building, all of which have been made locally and sponsored by members of ICAHD. The circular shape of the centre reflects the style of traditional buildings in the region.

After three days, the initial stages of the work were completed.

On the first day, work involved laying the foundations: digging a deep trench around the area where the outer walls of the building would stand. The trench was filled with large rocks which were then covered with cement, mixed by hand.

The next two days were spent building the lower part of the wall. This involved the heavy work of piling the adobe bricks onto a lorry to bring them to the site and then passing them in chains from the lorry to the spot where they were being laid. The mud mortar holding them in position was made by hand on the site itself. The process was started by sieving sand, before mixing it with water to form a paste which was poured into buckets to be delivered to the (professional Palestinian) bricklayers.

By the time our friends from ICAHD left, five layers of bricks had been laid on the circular walls of our future centre. After three nights sleeping, eating and working at the site, they were looking forward to a shower and a bed!