Smart kid in Algeria

One week ago, the BBC Arabic interviewed this young man. He's grew up in a refugee camp, I think in Algeria. But he managed to go to college, and he learned engineering.

When he finished his degree, he came up with the idea of building houses of plastic bottles filled with dirt. Apparently, it keeps the houses at a better temperature, and more protected from rain and wind, then the regular dirt houses in the camp.

Here you see them gathering up filled bottles:

And here you see the beginnings of a wall, with the circular house layout beyond:

He figured out that the plastic helps reinforce the dirt. I guess it makes it sturdier than if it's just dirt. And they also must patch the crevices between each bottle with more dirt. Yes, you can see in the following photo that they are patching up the wall of brimful plastic bottles, while bringing bags of more bottles.

Apparently, they're even able to hook these homes up with air conditioning and electricity! Each home is 400 meters squared - just a single room. And it costs 1000 Euros per building - that sounds kind of expensive for discarded plastic bottles and dirt.

I might have heard some of this wrong, but i think he said you need 6000 bottles per house. All the material can be collected in the camps.

In the future, he wants to expand to building complete homes with multiple rooms, like a kitchen in one area.

They have not experienced floods yet, but these plastic-dirt houses are supposed to withstand them better than purely dirt homes.

"This was a dream of mine," says the young man. "I've very happy."

The first house he built was for his grandmother living in the refugee camp. She died 10 days before the interview :(

Mobs in Algeria

(February 7, 2014)

These Arabs in Algeria are destroying a village where the Mazigh live. The Mazigh are an ethnic minority:

This was a short clip that the BBC Arabic ran throughout the day, but I don't think they had a lot of information. They didn't do in-depth analysis. Maybe they had been unable to get a hold of anyone. They did show part of a video that a Mazigh man appeared to have made. He was saying that the Mazigh are Algerian citizens, but it looks like some Arab Algerians are unhappy about that.

In addition to destroying the village, they destroyed World Heritage Sites, as named by Unesco, which were located in the village.

And the segment also mentioned that while all this destruction was going on, the police forces were just watching. I think one man interviewed said something like, we were looking to the police for help, but the police was just staring.

Hopefully, it won't happen again. Here is an article in English that describes what happened.

But it looks like it was very scary while it was happening. Look at this poor man running from the truck:

And still running:

If he was one of the rioters, though, serves him right.

The Book Fair in Algeria

There was an international book fair in Algeria last month. This sounded like such a peaceful, fun, stimulating, and out-of-character event that I felt I had to share it. Check out the photos below.

The last photo is of one of the authors showing her books at the fair. Nice!