Construction Work Snapshots

Project:
To build a 9th grade classroom and an extra bathroom. The elementary school in Puerto El Morro currently has space for kindergarten through 8th grade. While 9th grade in Ecuador is part of secondary school and most children travel to Playas, a larger town 8km from Puerto El Morro, there are a handful of students that daily cannot afford the 50 cent bus fare both ways to attend classes. By building a 9th grade space in the town, these 40 students will be able to continue further with their education. The hope is to have the new classroom finished by the time classes resume in April.

Materials:
5 shovels
2 wheelbarrows (although 1 is often out of commission)
1 pickaxe
1 too-heavy-to-function iron spear
1 40 pound weight (used to manually pack dirt)
1 hammer
3 plastic buckets
wooden planks
1 10' rickety ladder
1 trowel
string

Characters:
The Wizard – The toothless 50 year old began construction work 24 years ago and quickly stepped into the boss position without anyone really knowing how, or especially, why. We have named him Wizard, although his real name is Zapato (Shoe) – not sure which is better? He is in charge of all decisions and in typical machismo form, nothing can happen without the final nod of Wizard's approval. While he is officially the boss, he is the only one to have fallen flat on his face, poured concrete exactly where it is not needed, and has either under or over estimated the amount of dirt needed every time.

Wise Man – Mid 40's, soft-spoken, hardest worker I have ever seen in my life. Most of his communication is done through nods and grunts. It took over 2 weeks to learn his real name – Agusto.

Wimper – This is his real name. The community organizer with New Horizons (the organization we are volunteering with that offers projects across Ecuador). While we at first thought he was the hardest worker out of everyone, we have finally realized that he spends most of his time just looking incredibly busy.



With the encroaching deadline of finishing the classroom by the time school vacation is over in 2 months, our days of construction have not been easy. At all. In 3 weeks I have lifted more buckets of dirt than I ever have and used a shovel for more continuous hours than I ever thought I could. Yet despite all of our toil and subsequent progress, there are just some moments that you wonder how anything gets done at all.

I don't care how you look at it, concrete is a bitch. For every 12' x 15' patch of foundation, we need 150 plastic buckets of dirt, 15 bags of cement, some sand, some rocks – it's a precise mixture to say the least. Dirt is delivered from Playas, two towns over, by a dump truck that is painted in typical Latin American fashion – bright yellow, green, red, blue, a giant Fisher Price meets construction. Yet the school is tucked so far into the center of town that it is impossible to deposit the dirt close to the site. Wimper and Wizard begin ripping down the school-yard fence in an effort to squeeze the truck through. Yet after 20 minutes, they realize it's futile and the truck turns around to dump the dirt in the back of someone's house. Now not only is the dirt very far away and on the other side of a concrete wall, but the school fence is also broken. (We wouldn't want to run out of projects now would we?) After 6 hours of hauling dirt, it is still not enough to make concrete for the remaining floor foundation. No problem, we'll add rocks. Wimper heads to the kindergarten playground and begins to scoop up the fine rock chips that lay underneath the rickety, rusting swing set. The sand comes from underneath a pile of trash and wood in the corner of the school-yard. We mix the concrete and hope it will stretch. It falls short. There is no more dirt, no more sand, and we can't make concrete just from the kindergarten rocks. So there is no more work tomorrow. “Maybe we will go fishing!” Wimper exclaims.

The 3 p.m sun wass brutal and the number of buckets of dirt filled, carried 100ft and dumped had reached the hundreds. Josh had drained his water bottle and the water in mine was almost reaching boiling point. We all sat down for a breather in the small patch of speckled shade and wiped our brows. Wimper sent the 7 year old boy, who was filling his bored afternoon by watching and climbing on the rusting rebar towers, to bring back a gallon of water from the nearby store. The boy scampered off. He came back several minutes later balancing the bottle on the back of his neck, keeled over from the weight. “No esta helada! Traiga una helada!” Bring a cold one! Wimper called out. The boy turned around and stumbled back down the hill. When he returned Wimper asked: “Esta helado?” “Es hielo!” It's ice! The boy called back. We watched Wimper take the block of frozen ice from the boy and place it in the sun to melt. Good, in a couple hours we would each have an ounce to drink.


There are two types of scorpions in Puerto El Morro, the brown and the black. According to Wimper, if you get stung by a brown one, you get very sick and should be rushed to the doctor immediately. If you get stung by the black one, it doesn't really matter what you do; you'll die. So what happens when Wimper finds a huge, pregnant black scorpion nestled between the bags of concrete that we have been walking around all day? He holds it by the tail and proceeds to walk around showing it to everyone, poking it with a piece of rebar just to make sure it's good and pissed off. Obviously. Then he drowns it in the bottom 1/8th of a plastic Coke bottle. We continue mixing concrete. Once the scorpion goes limp, Wimper dumps it in the wheelbarrow. It twitches and squirms. We go back to work. Until Wise Man stops shoveling. And when Wise Man stops shoveling, we all stop shoveling. He looks over at the wheelbarrow curiously. “Olvide!” Wimper shouts and rushes to the barrow, jamming his shovel into the head of the scorpion that had been born anew and was proceeding to crawl up the side of the barrow. Now how one forgets they are in the process of killing the most poisonous scorpion I don't really know. By this time Wise Man had returned to shoveling, and feeling guilty by his work ethic, we resume mixing the heavy slop of concrete. “Miren!” Look! Wimper exclaims as he walks over carrying only the bottom half of the mama scorpion, the 70 egg sacs spilling from its stomach. Needless to say, the day quickly falls apart after the anatomy lesson; shoveling just seems so much more mundane.

While the first week was learning the South American science of concrete mixing, the second week was defined by digging a poop hole. A giant 9' x 9' septic tank that the new bathroom will feed into. At this size, the hole will only have to be emptied once every 10 years. We split up into teams – Wizard and Wise Man break up the earth with the pickaxe, Josh shovels it out of the hole, Amanda and I then shovel the dirt from the ground to the wheelbarrow that is poised waist-level on the new foundation, and Wimper wheels the dirt 100 ft away. No, this is not a fast process – not only because of the many steps, but because the ground is made of rock. After 5 days of progressively harder digger and gradually higher dirt slinging, we hit 8'6”. “No mas,” Wimper declares, “Esta finito.” The dirt is too rocky, the work too hard, and the Ecuadorian trio has long been over it. The hole is finished, they all decide. When the only plans you have are a pencil sketch on a muddy scrap of paper, it's easy to change them.