25 January 2012

The school construction project at Mission of Hope is in full swing. John and Lisa Armour are here from Jacksonville, and Daniel Paajanen is here all the way from Alaska. They are all construction masterminds who really know what's going on, and are making sure this building is being built right. There have been more than a few conversations like "in America, we'd have four guys and heavy equipment doing this job, and here in Haiti, we have no heavy equipment, but 30 Haitian guys doing the same job". We've been averaging 35-50 guys on the site each day, and they all work so hard. Friday was a big concrete pour day, meaning there was a cement mixer (not a truck, just a mixer about 8ft in diameter), a big square vat (about 10ft x 10ft) it dumped the cement in, and about 40 five gallon buckets. Talk about a bucket brigade: you've never seen this many guys having this much fun on a construction site. They would throw the buckets (full of wet concrete) to each other pretty much as fast as they could, and would all be laughing and jumping around, especially when someone dropped one. It was quite a riot.

The last three days I've been in charge of the 'dirt crew'. There's lots of different things happening simultaneously on the job site - carpenters working on concrete forms, Boss Leon and his guys working on rebar layout and tying, the masons building interior block walls on one side of the building, and my crew moving dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. The problem is that there's not a lot of extra room really anywhere, so when they excavated a while ago to pour some of the footers, all the dirt ended up actually inside the building perimeter, meaning we now have to move it again to be able to set the forms for the floor cross-beam footers. So the last two days have been spent moving dirt from here to there by about 10 guys using pickaxes and shovels and wheelbarrows and a super great laser level thing that sends out a signal from a tripod that goes to a sensor on a long vertical yardstick so you can tell if this thing way over here is exactly where it's supposed to be. Yesterday they dug out two big trenches through a huge dirt mound so the rebar can be laid for the rest of the footer, and today they dug a third trench and moved another big chunk of the huge pile to backfill around some of the foundation that's been poured.

More to come tonight (and hopefully a few pictures tomorrow), but that's the short version for now.

To Him be the Glory!