This machine has helped our workers since 1962!! The story begins in Halifax. A friend, Don Mitchell, saw the slides of our falling down school. We were afraid to build a new 3-storey building on the site we had cut out from the mountain. The weight might be too much. Don asked how we would build. I said in re-inforced concrete. He had noticed our toy train with its stream engine. He told me to use ash hollow blocks to make the building half the weight. And so it began. This machine made tens and thousands of blocks for the new school -- and for homes, two other schools, barns, poultry buildings, retaining walls, etc. At Rs.5000/- it was the best buy of my life though (Sob!) it started me on my chronic red ink career!!

It never dawned on my friend, Don, what harvest we would reap from his seed of concern for the poor. Don's ash hollow blocks resulted in perfect acoustics for our new school. To teach oral English, we did a lot of choral work in class. The echoes of chanting children didn't bounce around the school like blasts from a rock band. Ash blocks swallowed them as completely as the whale swallowed Jonah! And on our Himalayan mountainsides those in SASAC hollow block homes need not shiver all winter. Hollow blocks hold heat like mothers snuggling babies. Just goes to show, The Lord took Don's ash block, as he took the boy's five loaves on the hillside in Galilee and multiplied it to bring help and joy to a multitude.