Wednesday afternoon saw little relief from the heat. But Joseph led us onward. Our next stop was a village of brickmakers. You have probably never wondered where bricks in India are made, but at least now you’ll know. Joseph has a ministry of provision in this small community. We came with him as he distributed rice and lentils.

Only one thing better than a food truck, and that’s a food cart.

Being brickmakers, I wasn’t surprised to find that brick was the main building material of their village. I doubt there were more than twenty buildings totals.

Look closely below and you’ll see a tiny foot sticking out under that purple cloth. A small child was napping under the tree where we took a small break from the sun’s intense warmth. From this viewpoint, we could see the rice fields that wrapped around the village. The main thing I noticed here was the silence. There weren’t even birds and not a horn to be heard for miles.

From this point you could also see the smoke stack used in the brick making.

And this was the kitchen sink. I doubt those pans will ever be truly clean as they are washed in dirty water.

Behind the village were piles among piles of bricks, stacked, and ready to be sold.

If you were to place your had above the open area, you would feel some extremely hot air. The bricks were being baked in the mound that we stood and walked upon to reach the smoke stack. Basically, we were walking on a giant dutch oven.

Our driver Sunil was very professional around us. Most of the time, he would hang back or fall out of sight until he was needed to drive again. However, he followed us around and seemed pretty interested in what we did and saw in this village. I used a telephoto lens to capture this picture of him because he would duck every time I turned the camera toward him. Later on of course, he actually smiled. I think we had worn him down. He even made a joke and posed…but I missed it due to shock that he wanted me to take his picture.

In the history of Indian religions, the swastika is a sacred symbol. And then Hitler made a horrific design decision. Of course that’s really not a good way to describe what happened, and probably a little crass. However, even knowing the history, I was still slightly taken aback whenever I came across the symbol…which being in India, happened a lot.