Clay Water Brick

Clay Water Brick

Adult nonfiction
"Patrick didn't have much. As a boy, he lost most of his family
when a militant rebel group attacked his village in northern Uganda.
He and his younger brother fled the only home that they had ever known
and fled south. Patrick was unsure where they would end up, but after
weeks of traveling they settled in a village near the Uganda-Kenya
border, where they came across some distant cousins. They wanted to
be as close as they could to family--any family at all.
Patrick and his brother had no home, no money, not even shoes on
their feet. They were young, orphaned, uneducated, homeless, and
hungry."
Growing up, Jessica Jackley, author of Clay Water Brick,
believed that Jesus wanted her to help the poor. She began raising
money and sending it to charities. After awhile she became daunted by
the size of the task and disconnected from the people she wanted to
help by layers of bureaucracy.
As a college graduate, Jackley wanted to become a high ranking
officer in a non profit. She had no clue how to get there. Then she
attendee a lecture by Dr. Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and
a microfinance pioneer who would win the Nobel Peace Prize. He
changed the course of her life.
"This turned my understanding of poverty on its head. The
people Yunus spoke of were not just sad faces on a brochure,
synonymous with the issue of poverty itself...The environments into
which these individuals had been born were the problem, environments
that denied them access to the proper tools to thrive. These were not
weak, helpless people. These were people who were capable, tenacious,
and resourceful...These were entrepreneurs."
Clay Water Brick weaves two fascinating narrative threads
together seamlessly. One is the quite intimate (warts and all) story
of Jackley and her organization. The other is the colorful lives of
third world entrepreneurs including:
*Patrick who, with no other resources than the ground beneath his
feet, became a brick maker,
*Katherine, who switched from selling vegetables to selling fish when
she discovered a big demand in her village,
and *Zica, a hairdresser who, when she discovered that the products
available didn't do much for people with tightly curled or frizzy
hair, set out to concoct better ones in her kitchen.
Whether or not you have any desire to become a microfinancier or
entropreneur, I believe you'll enjoy and be inspired by Clay Water
Brick. Jackley concludes the book with these powerful words:
"...Dream--and then choose to believe in your own potential and help
create the future you're dreaming of."
That's why I'm in graduate school.
On a personal note, school, work, home, sleep, and commuting make up
my days. We're less than two weeks from Thanksgiving break which I
hope to use to get well ahead on my rest of the semester work. I also
plan to bake a huge batch of snowball cookies for my work family. We
saw snow yesterday.
Saturday at work I was assigned to do deli. The problem: at brunch
almost nobody wants sandwiches. I hate standing still while everyone
else works. So how could I get the person who assigned me to change
and think it was his idea? I started asking "Is it 2:00 (when deli
shuts down) yet?" when he walked by. It only took 45 minutes. Can I
help it that my work ethic is hyperactive?
A great big shout out goes out to the LGBTQ community for putting on
Gay Thanksgiving, my beloved husband for not having a heart attack,
and my work family for being totally awesome.
jules hathaway


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