Yunguilla Artisan Project
Proyecto Artesenal de Yunguilla
Click here for information about donating to the project

In April and May of 2005, we (Neill Prohaska and Heather West) had the opportunity to work as volunteers in a village called Yunguilla, Ecuador. During this time, we had the privilege to help the community build an arts and crafts workshop. In particular, we raised funds for the project, and designed and built a kiln and potter’s wheel. We also learned a lot about community organization, creative problem solving, alternative development, and intercultural understanding. And of course, we made a lot of good friends along the way.

The Village of Yunguilla

Yunguilla is a small rural village straddling a dirt road that winds through part of the cloud-forest bioregion of the Ecuadorian Andes. It is home to approximately 300 people. The town is located directly on the equator, about two hour’s drive from Quito, at an elevation of 8,700 feet. The climate is temperate, with two seasons: winter, which is cool, cloudy and wet, and summer, which is dryer, with warmer days and cold, clear nights.

Views of the valley from the village

This community has organized a workers’ cooperative, la Corporación Microempresarial Yunguilla, which serves primarily to create jobs for the people who live there. The biggest social problem in small, rural villages like Yunguilla is that most of the young people have to leave in order to find work in Ecuador’s big cities or abroad, sending money back home.

The community store, the cooperative’s logo, and locally made cheese

Farming is the mainstay of the village. People walk each morning one to three hours to tend their land and cattle. Historically they worked as indentured laborers on the hacienda that encompassed all the lands of the area. However, during the agricultural reform of the 1960’s they obtained their own properties from the margins of what used to be the hacienda (the best lands were typically retained by wealthy land-holders). These properties are of low -quality and spread far apart, so they built their houses near the state-run school to enable their kids to receive primary education; this is the reason that they have to walk or ride so far to work their land.

Environmental education class working the community gardens

About 90% of the working-age people of the village are voting members of the workers’ co-op, which makes the democratic participation of the community in the co-op very strong. They hold town meetings at least once a week, discussing ideas and concerns, and voting on plans of action. Within the cooperative different groups have developed eco-tourism and re-forestation projects, jam and cheese-making facilities, built a community store, and created community organic gardens (which supply the store and jam enterprise as well as feeding the eco-tourists).

The local public school

Members of the community wanted to develop an arts and crafts collective. They had made recycled paper greeting cards in the past, but had stopped primarily because they didn’t have a space in which to continue working. Heather offered to teach what she knew about ceramics and other arts and crafts, and the community was very excited by the idea. Through a series of meetings, we discussed what resources were already available for such a project and what extra resources would be needed. There are abundant clay deposits all along the road leading up the mountains into the village, many of which proved, after test-firing them at the Central University of Quito, to be of excellent quality for pottery. They had the materials, but they needed some instruction and a kiln to fire them. So we sent out letters to friends and family, asking for donations to help build a kiln and a workshop.

Carrying bricks, left to right: volunteer Vanya Rohwer, volunteer Heather West, and local Gerardo Morales

Unfortunately, firebrick for kiln construction is virtually impossible to obtain in Ecuador, and even if we could have found any it would have been prohibitively expensive. Instead, we decided to build the kiln out of adobe bricks: they are inexpensive, easy to repair, and able to withstand the high temperatures needed for firing clay. We hauled over 600 raw and fired adobe bricks, at around 15 pounds apiece, up a steep hill to a site we had leveled for building the workshop and kiln. After moving all the brick, we began building the kiln and open-air workshop.

Volunteers Jessica Welker, Noemí Ulinger, and Heather West parade uphill past the cheese and jam facilities, bearing bricks

Under the fearless direction of Johnny Collaguazo, the town carpenter, we dug holes and set cypress posts in hand-mixed concrete to support the workshop roof. We started building the kiln while Johnny continued the building of the workshop around it.

Town carpenter Johnny Collaguazo building the workshop

We first laid a protective foundation of fired adobes, and then began to build up the fireboxes out of raw adobe bricks. Once the fireboxes were to height, we set the kiln shelves for the chamber floor.

Heather contemplates the kiln foundation and lays the first course of adobes

Rectangular kiln shelves aren’t available in Ecuador, so we made do with octagonal shelves, patching the holes with diatomaceous earth that we had collected from the grounds of a military school in a distant town. Diatomaceous earth, which consists primarily of silica, is the closest thing to refractory clay we could find.

The completion of the fireboxes and laying of chamber floor, top: Jessica Welker and Heather West; bottom: Neill Prohaska

Two holes were left on each side at floor-level for gas-burner ports. Then the walls were raised, followed by the arched doorway and the ceiling. We built frames to make the arches for the door and ceiling. The arches supported the adobes as they were laid and were then removed when the mortar had set.

Top: building the door arch; Bottom: building the ceiling chamber arch

Closing up the chamber and working on the chimney

The kiln is a down-draft, modified from a design in The Kiln Book, by Frederick Olsen. It can burn wood or dung in its fireboxes, and can be converted to burn gas by blocking the firebox entrance flues and placing burners in the small square ports we left for that purpose. A large part of Ecuador’s economy is oil-production, and domestic propane is heavily subsidized. Wood is available locally at no financial cost; however, gathering it requires labor, and for a community working to preserve the cloud forest, wood is not always the best option. With this kiln design, they can choose whichever fuel best meets their needs.

The chimney, in all its 18 feet of wonky glory

Because air is less dense at higher altitude, more air is required in order to supply enough oxygen to efficiently burn the wood. To create a strong enough pull, the chimney needed to be 15 ½ feet tall from the floor of the kiln chamber where the exit flue is located (for a total of about 18 feet above the floor of the workshop).

Hot stuff: Heather welding the firebox grates, and their use in the first firing of the kiln

The beginning of the first firing!

It was a bit of a rush to fire the kiln before we had to return to the U.S., but we were able to teach interested community members how to use the kiln, and we fired the first attempts at pottery-making by many of the town’s teenage girls. There weren’t many pieces ready to be fired; most of our time was spent working on the kiln and workshop, leaving little time for instruction. Also, it takes a considerable amount of time to dry processed clay and greenware in such a cool, moist climate. So to fill up the kiln for the first firing we also fired all the extra raw adobe bricks left over from construction; many community members are also very interested in using the kiln to make their own bricks.

Édison Oña bricking up the doorway just before the first firing

We had our fingers crossed for the first firing because, although we knew it should work in theory, we didn’t know what was actually going to happen. The kiln and all the adobes inside it were undoubtedly still a little wet, and during the construction process we discovered that many of the raw adobes had strange bits of urban archaeology embedded in them (marbles, candy-wrappers, part of a dog’s jawbone, the head of a disposable razor, etc.). We were very relieved when nothing burst, cracked or crumbled.

Left: our host brother, Bayron Morales-Parra stokes the fire; Right: inside, the pots are beginning to glow

We took the firing slowly, bisquing to cone 04 in seven hours (in ideal conditions this kiln should reach cone 10 in under six hours). The wood was a little wet, but otherwise everything worked perfectly.

Dusk, about six hours into the firing

We were also able to design and build a potter’s kick-wheel. We found plans on the internet from Mother Earth News, and adapted them to fit the resources available in Yunguilla. For example, at the bottom we placed an old car hub and car tire filled with sand to be used as the kick-weight, instead of casting a comparatively expensive round slab of concrete. We were also fortunate to befriend a metalworker from El Valle de los Chillos, about three hours from Yunguilla. He helped immensely in the construction of the kick-wheel: he drove us around the city for parts, gave us free access to his workshop, tools and materials, introduced us to his brother who did some critical metal-lathe work for free, and even let us sleep at his house the night Heather was up late in his workshop welding the firebox grates for the kiln).

The Kick-wheel, before adding the tire	The newly formed Yunguilla artisan collective

Our host sister Elsa Morales-Parra at the wheel	Johnny Collaguazo at the wheel

The community of Yunguilla now has the basic tools and materials to make ceramics, and space for other arts and crafts as well. We plan to return to Ecuador from May 16 to July 4, 2006, so that Heather can spend that time finally giving them all the instruction in ceramics technique that they need to continue the project on their own. We will be bringing them propane burners, since we were unable to find suitable burners in Ecuador, so they will be able to fire the kiln with gas. After that, this project will be entirely theirs. We also hope to do a workshop on building ovens for baking. There are only two ovens in the village. As we were building the kiln, several people asked, “Do you think we could roast a pig in there?” or “could we bake bread in that?”

The artisan ceramics project is an opportunity for creative, viable income and sustainable development for generations to come. The people of the community have expressed extreme gratitude for the help that they have received from the generous donations and fundraising that our friends and family undertook in the U.S., and they are very excited to be able to continue the project indefinitely into the future.

Click here for information about donating to the project