Going first class
Mon, Feb 16, 2009
6:00 am
The first morning at the Mission Center is always slow. At least for people from Seattle (6:00 am is 5:00 am Real Time), so getting up at 6:00 is a nice way to get some quiet time. The Connecticut folks are up and about (since it's 8:00 am their time), but they're still sneaking about.
And, for the first time (ever!) there's coffee! Yay! Fr. Jim set it up last night (he loaded two coffee pots, but we can't turn them both on at the same time, because that would blow the circuits). So, all I have to do is flip a button and hang out for ten minutes and Coffee!!
6:30 am
It seems, however, there's a price for Fr. Jim setting up the coffee--he requires that a cup be fetched and delivered to him before he will be roused. Minions are dispatched and coffee is delivered.
6:45 am
I'm in the center of a city of two million people. It's Monday (and not Presidents Day here in Mexico), so it's a regular business day.
And as I sit outside, the loudest thing I hear is a rooster. A dog barking. A train in the distance. A truck rumbles by. A couple of dogs are having an argument. Very little traffic noise or city bustle.
I like it.
7:45 am
Fr. Dan gathers us together and lays out the plan: walls up by the end of the day. He says that the plan is to have a long day today (use us up while we're fresh) and make some serious progress.
Since we're still fresh, we think this is a splendid idea! Let's do some work!
8:20 am
Three years ago, Laura and I came down for our first visit and built a house for the minister of a church (technically, it's a rectory, because he lives there). It was a lot of work and seemed really hard and we thought it was a miracle that we ever got it done.
We drove by today and it's still there! Woohoo! So we got to point it out to some of the new folks in the van. And there is nothing (nothing!) cooler than being able to say, "See that house? I built that. And then gave it away!"
8:30 am
We stop by the local cathedral, San Jose, which is a work in progress (being worked on as money and crews become available--it's been in progress at least four years now and it's still waiting for its bell towers). It's finished enough that the altar and chairs can remain set up for Sunday worship.
I explain the story to the folks in the van which I got three years ago from Fr. Jim: A doctor from Tacoma named Joseph was always coming down on these mission trips and helping to build houses. One summer he came down, the weather was extra hot, the guy was in his 60's, overheated, went home and died. His family said, "Hey, this stuff was important to him. Here's a pile of money to build a BIG church."
And that's how the cathedral got started, and it's named after Joseph (Jose is the Mexican version). It's an Anglican cathedral, and they managed to get the land donated by the government (which is pretty much unheard of in a country where 105% of the people are Roman Catholic).
9:00 am
We see our building site, and woohoo! Jesus has been nice to us this year! It's flat. It's got four bodegas within a stone's throw. It has a flush toilet in a proper bathroom with a door that locks (not the usual outhouse). Granted, there's no roof on the bathroom, but today's a nice day.
We've ALL been upgraded to First Class!
Of course, "First Class" is a relative term. Most of the houses around here are either cinder brick or tar paper shacks. We left the paved part of the road about half a mile back, and most of the fences are made from old pallets or mattress springs
9:30 am
Guinea Pig Ed is sort of our de facto leader, since he's done this before (and actually paid attention) and he speaks Spanish, so he can check in with the guys who really know how to do it: Jose Limas (who has been here for every build I've ever been to and just oozes competance) and Aner (his 20-something son who still knows more than 9/10ths of us put together).
So Ed lays out the building plan:
Today: Roof and walls
Tomorrow: Bring earplugs (lots of hammering and if you're inside the house...)
Day 3: Stucco!
The house we build is 450 square feet and has three rooms--two bedrooms and a living room. The concrete slab is already poured and cured when we show up.
And, bonus!, all the materials are here! We don't have to lug them out of storage into the vans because there's secure storage here for them. The house we're building is right next to a previous Gateway house, where Pedro and Petra live. They also live with their three children, one of whom has four kids of her own.
So that's two, plus three, plus four is a LOT of people living in a 450 square foot house. The new house will provide some breathing room, as the daughter can live there with her kids and husband.
Our first task is to cut boards down to size. Lots and lots of boards. Fortunately, there's a list of exactly how many boards are needed and how long each board is and there's a method (The Gateway Method) that we all follow.
It's pretty easy work, but you have to pay attention, especially when you have to cut 46 boards that are 82" long (you don't want to lose track, or cut 82 boards that are 46" long).
10:30 am
Now we take all our boards and start nailing them together to make a frame for a wall. And another wall with a window. And yet another wall with a window.
There's not enough room to do this all on the concrete slab, so we decide to build them out in the dirt road. This isn't as crazy as it sounds--it's a wide road, we're only taking up half of it, and we don't see a lot of traffic. Plus, we're in Mexico.
11:15 am
Still, there seems to be a lot of people driving by saying, "Those crazy gringos are building a house in the middle of the street." We smile and wave to help reinforce the "crazy" part.
11:30 am
We've picked up a helper: a local kid named Carlos who looks about eight years old. He's actually pretty good--he knows where to hold, how to hammer, and always finds useful ways to help (in the past, not all the "helpers" have been terribly "helpful"). He's got a good mechanical sense.
Which got me to wondering: why isn't this kid in school with all the other kids?
It turns out that you can't go to school here unless you have a birth certificate. And you can't get a birth certificate in the mail--you have to go to your home town and get it.
A lot of folks here have left really poor parts of Mexico (yeah, this is the GOOD part of the country) and they have no desire to go back (not to mention no money to get there). So this kid can't go to school, or after-school programs or even day care. So he hangs around with us.
12:00 Noon
Lunch!
Mogales, the cook at the mission center, has this amazing magic trick she does with burritos. She puts mysterious ingredients in them (beans and potatoes seem to be critical ingredients) and the result is that two scrawny little burritos fill you up (even teenage boys!).
But this doesn't dissuade us from heading 50 feet down the street to the bodega, which has about as much stuff as one tiny corner of a 7-11 store. But what a corner! Crunchy salty food, sodas made with real sugar, and a wide variety of sugary goods!
And I find out that Fr. Jim totally lied about "Penguinos." They are NOT marshmallow penguins. They are Hostess Snack Cakes (the chocolate ones with white icing on the top, which seems to be why they are called "Penguinos," as they certainly are not penguin shaped).
I'm disappointed, but not so badly that I don't scarf down a couple of the penguins. With the change (everything here is amazingly cheap--sodas are about 40 cents, snacks are 30 to 40 cents), we give Carlos a half-peso piece, which buys him a round of video games (and if you can't go to school, at least you can play video games!).
Carlos also managed to score his share of snack cookies (you get huge bags for 60 cents and you can't finish them yourself, so having a hungry Mexican kid nearby turns out to be pretty handy).
1:40 pm
Local traffic report:
"Traffic on the dirt road outside the local school has come to a standstill, due to a bunch of gringos building a house, apparently in the middle of the road. Parents coming to pick up their children are experiencing significant delays with some parking up to a block away and walking through the construction side to retrieve their kids."
We're just happy nobody drove over one of our walls.
2:00 pm
As the walls start to go up, and the traffic jams clear, it looks really cool. In an hour or so, we go from bare slab to the four outside walls, and major inside divider wall in place.
This doesn't go unnoticed in the neighborhood, and a steady stream of people start showing up, asking what's going on.
One woman who looks about 200 years old comes over and talks to Guinea Pig Ed for a while. She's asking how she would go about applying for the program. Before she leaves, she earnestly grasps each of our hands and says (in Spanish) "God Bless You." Ed cues us to say "Igualmente," which seems to mean "The same to you" (although with Ed, you can never be too sure...).
3:00 pm
All the walls are now up and glued to the concrete slab with polyurethane expandomatic foam stick-em stuff.
Now we start putting up this wall board stuff called "Oriented Strand Board," which goes on the outside of all the walls. It's a lot of hammering at weird angles.
3:30 pm
But you can always count on Fr. Jim to break things up. He got to playing around with the polyurethane foam dispenser and "It just started going!" and spraying expanding foam everywhere. Fortunately, he has the presence of mind to stand in a corner of the site while foam is spraying like Silly String(tm), but it still looks goofy.
4:20 pm
Most days we quit at three, but like I said earlier, Fr. Dan wanted to whip the mules while they were fresh. Also, you don't really want to leave your walls lying around in the street, although, as it turned out, we did leave our roof sections off to one side of the street.
We all pile
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