In the fall of 1994, after writing our first book, “The Straw Bale House,” that left us almost penniless, the Farmer to Farmer Program at the University of Arizona offered to cover our food, lodging and travel expenses in exchange for teaching straw bale building in the city of Obregon, Sonora. We readily accepted.

Ciudad Obregon is a modern city revolving around industrial agriculture. It was probably the last place in Mexico we wanted to go.  It is the birthplace of the Green Revolution. With over a million acres of wheat cultivated in the area, an excessive amount of straw is typically burned every season, filling the entire Yaqui valley with smoke. Save the Children Foundation had begun a housing program, hoping to transform this straw “waste” into a productive building material.

Housing in Mexico, especially for the poorer segments of the population, is increasingly being reduced to a pair of options, neither of which is very satisfactory. One option is to buy a piece of land, piece together a shack using cardboard, scrap wood, or, most commonly, black corrugated asphalt panels and live in it until, it is hoped, one can afford to build a concrete and brick house. The other option is to buy one of the ultra-small concrete houses in the subdivisions sponsored by the Mexican government’s agency, Infonovit. These identical houses are between 400 and 600 square feet in size and built in long rows by the thousands. Extremely overpriced to start with, they also come with excessive interest rates. In both cases, these houses are predictably hot in the summer and cold in even mild winters.

Working alongside Save the Children, we saw this as a great opportunity to explore a totally different way of building. We had all the bales we needed. The clay soils that plagued conventional builders in the region were perfect for plasters, straw/clay blocks, paints and floors. The carrizo reeds (arundo donax) would work as exterior bale pins and ceilings. These materials cost next to nothing and, since they were better suited to hand crafted labor than power tools, women and children could also play a part.

What followed was an incredible collaboration between the Mexican people and ourselves.  Ideas and skills flowed in both directions. The people were often geniuses when it came to making do with little or nothing. They would try to fix rather than replace, invent rather than buy. The cross-cultural mix provided a diversity of perspectives and talents that creatively reinvented our thinking and way of building.

Those years were as much about building people as it was about building an office. People from around the world would regularly join us. The work sites were often international communities with some of the most unlikely companions working side by side. Life-long friendships were created, some taking years to develop. In the beginning, many of the Mexican people, especially the women, would leave the room every time we entered, and would not speak directly to us. Eventually, we became family. Much of the work that we do today is made possible by the connections we made during those years.