An Ethiopian Farm Woman Uses the Soil for Construction and for Art.

The following soil story is from Dr. Ray Weil, a soil scientist from the University of Maryland.

This photo is of a farm woman in the highlands of Ethiopia standing in the doorway of her village home. Not only is her home made almost entirely of soil (various kinds of clayey soils made into mud and smeared over a framework of sticks), but she has decorated her home inside and out with different colored soils from different horizons, using a coke bottle bottom as a 'stencil'. Inside her home, she has 'built-in' shelves made of hardened mud to store her pots and cups which she uses in the famous Ethiopian coffee ceremony.