Afghan Recovery Fires Up Demand for Brick-Making

Kabul is built of dirt. Squat little homes of mud and clay have been carved from the bare brown hills that ring the city, and vast adobe slums have risen from the earth itself.

The building blocks of the capital are pale tan bricks of dirt and clay. They are cut from the ground and fired in hundreds of earthen kilns that look like huge, prehistoric anthills belching pungent black smoke.

War and reconstruction have been good to the men who earn their living in the brutish work of brick-making. With Kabul’s government-owned brickyard destroyed by war, hundreds of smaller operations are thriving as Afghanistan’s rebuilding effort stokes an insatiable demand for bricks.

“Oh, we never stop working, day and night, always. We sleep here,” said Ghulam Farouk, bringing an ax crashing down on a tree stump he was cutting up to feed the roaring blaze inside his kiln on the capital’s southern shoulder.

Since Taliban forces were routed here more than three months ago, Kabul’s brick makers have struggled to keep up with efforts to rebuild businesses, government offices, private homes and public works. The demand has more than doubled from a year ago, said Mohammed Musa, a wholesaler.

The government brickyard produced 24,000 bricks a day before it was destroyed, Musa said. Now the demand in Kabul alone is for 500,000 to 600,000 bricks a day. More than 400 small, family-owned yards are rushing to fill the void.

The Dash-e-Zikria brickyard was running on full throttle the other day. Farouk and his brother, kiln owner Ghulam Zikria, were frantically chopping wood to keep the fire hot enough to produce quality bricks. A mountain of logs twice an adult’s height was shrinking as fireman Abdul Ali stuffed one log after another into the belly of the kiln, where the wood disintegrated in a spray of red and orange flame.

A year ago, the brothers said, their kiln was often idle. They sold perhaps 1,000 bricks every two or three weeks and shut down during the winter. Now, they said, they are selling 3,000 bricks a day, with fresh orders arriving daily. They intend to work year-round.

“Before, it wasn’t safe to rebuild because of the fighting. It wasn’t even safe to be out here making bricks,” Zikria said.

The kiln was built from fire-honed bricks by the brothers’ grandfather 50 years ago. It is wide at the base, tapering into a tall cone at the top, where the kiln juts from a muddy embankment. Cracks are plastered over with a mixture of mud, clay and straw. Smoke is channeled through a chimney at the crown of the kiln.

The Dai Khudaida district of southern Kabul is a moonscape, a treeless expanse of hard-packed clay dotted with tall kilns and pocked with pits from which the brick men shovel out the clay and mud that form the walls of the city’s buildings.

Making bricks is punishing, filthy, backbreaking work. There are no machines, only sweat and muscle. The clay and mud is packed into wooden frames of six bricks, each the size of a standard brick used in U.S. construction. The frames are stacked in the kilns, whose capacities range from 110,000 to 150,000 bricks per firing.

It is a long, tedious process: 24 days pass from the time the wet clay and soil is cut to the moment the first hard-fired bricks are fished out of the kiln.

The molds are placed in the kiln on a bed of marmar, a hard gray rock delivered from nearby mountains. When fired, the rock produces a chalk that is used in paints and plaster. It takes six days to load a kiln with marmar and thousands of wet bricks.

The kiln is fired for six days, allowed to cool for six days, then fired for another six days. It takes almost a week to unload the bricks and stack them in 1,000-brick loads that sell for the equivalent of about $11.75 for low-quality “red” bricks and $17.65 for “white” bricks fired at higher temperatures at the bottom of the kiln.

Though business is good, the brothers are not happy men. They are sore and tired from chopping wood and hauling bricks. They can’t remember their last day off.

Expenses were soaring, they complained. The cost of the hot-burning wood called archa, which is trucked from distant mountains, has climbed to $19 for each 1,200-pound load of firewood. They will burn 46,000 pounds of the wood to produce the 120,000 bricks now being fired in their kiln.

And they do not always receive full price from customers quick to find flaws in the bricks and demand discounts. “People are very particular about their bricks,” Farouk said, shrugging.

On the other hand, the brothers pay their laborers just under $1.50 a day. It’s a typical salary for manual labor in Kabul, and the men on the site said they were glad to have steady work after long stretches of unemployment during 23 years of war.

Zikria, the owner, said he was pleased with his new income, but he had the look of a defeated man. His eyes were sunken, his face thin and drawn. He had been at the site for days. Black grime had been baked into the creases of his neck and into the crow’s-feet at the corners of his dark eyes. His fingers were stained black.

“I hate brick work. It’s hard and dirty,” Zikria said, leaning on his ax, his turban stained with sweat on a damp, subfreezing morning shrouded in fog. “This was my father’s work, and my grandfather’s work, but it is not my fault this was the only work they could find. Me, I would rather own a shop and sit all day.”

Ali, the fireman, finished another round of feeding the flames and collapsed onto a stump to slurp at a cup of green tea. His face was flushed, and his breath came in sharp little coughs. He didn’t know his age, but he looked to be at least 60, a shriveled little man smeared with soot.

He looked up from his tea at a visitor and asked in a faint, plaintive voice: “Do you have a nice watchman’s job for me? I am so very, very tired.”