Juarez Hammer Time! -- Day 3
rob...@robertgidley.com
We turn an unassuming concrete slab into an actual building!
Tue, Feb 16, 2010
6:45 am
By the time we leave Juarez, I will probably have figured out how to set my alarm so that I get up on time. Today I had the time set correctly, had the alarm set for the correct day, but didn't actually turn it on. Fortunately, I'm a light sleeper, so when Fr. Dan's submarine klaxon alarm goes off one door over, it gets my attention.
7:15 pm
Breakfast is the usualy assortment of sugary cereals with strange Mexican names, such as "Choco Bolitas" (which is the same as "Cocoa Puffs" except that instead of a cuckoo bird proclaiming his insanity for Cocoa Puffs, there's a rabid squirrel on the front of the box demonstrating how you will feel after downing a bowl of these little sugary babies.
Most of the time, this church hosts Youth Groups that come to Juarez during the summer to build houses. As a result, the menu tends to cater towards youth tastes, such as four boxes of sugary cereal. The closest thing to an adult cereal is "Whole Bran con Pasas" (Raisin Bran), and even it's pretty loaded up with cane sugar.
This does not seem to bother some folks, such as Fr. Jim, who gleefully takes the opportunity to carbo-load with Choco Bolitas or Frutti Aros each day at breakfast, using the excuse that he has no other choice.
(It turns out though, that the apples put out in the basket for meals come from Washington state. So we've traveled 2,000 miles to eat apples grown a couple of hundred miles away.)
8:30 am
We arrive at the job site, after our morning commute through the pot-holed streets of Juarez. Every day we drive past the first house that I helped build (back in ought six) and every day I point it out, "Hey! I helped build that house!" It's pretty cool being able to say that.
(For those who were also on that trip, but not this one, it's still standing, and in good condition. The church next to it seems to also be doing well. The bus that had all the chickens next door is gone, though.)
Anyway, our goal today is to get the walls up, put roof beams on, install rafters, and put up siding on our Children's Outreach Center.
In other words, step one is to take all those walls we built yesterday, carry them over to the concrete slab and install them.
8:40 am
So the process is:
- Get a bunch of people standing on all sides of a wall piece
- Get them to lift it up (all at the same time, so it doesn't fall apart) and carry it over to the concrete slab.
- Stand it up on end
- Move it over to the edge of the slab, where special glue has been laid down.
- Hold it in place while Jose Limas (the senior Mexican carpenter) nails it into place with the other wall piece that a different bunch of people brought over while you were bringing this piece over
- Rinse and repeat
8:50 am
Oops. It seems that one of the walls is too long. Four inches too long, to be precise. Fortunately, the design is pretty forgiving, so a stud is removed, the plates (remember those?) are cut short four inches and the stud is reinstalled at the new end.
Of course, this means that everybody is standing around, literally holding up the walls while this happens.
Fr. Dan (who had goofed up the calculations that resulted in the wall overage) explains that "Our goal is excellence, not perfection."
9:50 am
All twelve of our walls are now in place, and it turns out not to be a dodecahedron, or a mult-dimensional building, but simply one with four very long walls made up of sub-walls. Looking at the size of the walls, I have to say that I would not have wanted to try and carry an entire wall at one time.
Our vacant slab is now looking very much like a building. A very big building.
10:25 am
We're putting up the outside walls, or really, the first layer of the outside walls. The first layer is made from something called "Oriented Strand Board" or OSB, which has a shiny reflective side that faces the inside of the house.
The next layer is chicken wire (we'll get to that later) and then stucco (which we hope we'll never get to).
Anyway, some people are nailing boards on top of the wall plates, in preparation for the roof, while those of us who don't like standing on the top rung of a ladder leaning over a concrete slab while hammering, are busy nailing OSB to the sides of the house.
10:45 am
All the bottom OSB is now in place (it takes two-and-a-quarter boards to go from bottom to top of the wall).
It occurs to me that we haven't built any roof pieces, like we do for a house. It turns out that this is a bad idea when you're building something that's ten feet tall, because when you try to lift the roof piece on top of the building, it falls back on your head (which is Not Good).
So we'll be building the roof in place.
11:15 am
And the first step of building a roof in place is to take the long beams that were built yesterday, and hoist them up on the roof. This takes about 2/3 of us lifting up the beam and the other 1/3 on ladders grabbing the beam that's lifted up and hoisting it onto the roof.
Fortunately, after a day and a half of working together, we've bonded to the point that this exercise in teamwork comes easily and naturally and everybody trusts everybody else (and nobody is confused about whether it's "1-2-3 lift on three" or "1-2-3 then lift").
So what could have been a messy and sloppy activity goes smoothly and easily and everybody does their part seamlessly. And all three beams are nestled on top of our building.
11:35 am
Early lunch!
Since we've been lifting all kinds of walls (walls with windows, walls with doors, walls with no windows) and hoisting three kinds of beams, we're all pretty hungy, so an early lunch break is called.
And today, we're back to Mogali burritos! Yay! Half of them are potato and half are beef, but they are all yummy and filling.
But not so filling that we don't send a van load of people to the store for dessert.
Today's weird food is titled "Milk Candy Wafers" and is made with goats milk and sugar. Fr. Dan describes them as "like caramel communion wafers" and says they are "an acquired taste."
They ARE a bit on the strange side (and at first bite, I'm not sure if I'm eating the wafer or the packaging material), but they're pretty yummy and I quickly acquire the taste.
1:30 pm
After a while on a Gateway Mission build, you get used to seeing strange things. Stuff you wouldn't see in the US, or ways of doing things that are unconventional.
But today I saw some real insanity.
It seems that the giant building we built is a little bit crooked. The middle part on one side kind of bows out a few inches. The solution?
Tie a piece of rebar around the top plate on the opposite side, tie the other end to the back of Jose's van and then use a come-along winch to pull the entire building to one side to make it even again.
Fr. Jim was tightening the winch while I was watching when it occurred to both of us that we were assuming the rebar (kind of an iron bar) was stronger than either the van OR the house. If we were wrong, we realized, it would be Bad. Fortunately, at that point, Simon showed up with a 1/2" piece of OSB to help shield us (kind of like using a tissue as a bullet-proof vest).
After ten or fifteen minutes of this insanity, Fr. Dan came over and called it to a halt and explained that a building that was "mostly square" was fine by him and fine with Mexico and spending a lot of time yanking the building this way and that using a van on a sandy slope that was being pulled across the slope by the building wasn't a productive use of our time.
I don't think I've ever agreed more with Fr. Dan on a topic.
2:00 pm
We've been working on getting the top layer and a quarter of OSB put up on the walls of the building. This requires lots of hammering and people hammering on tops of ladders.
I don't get along very well with ladders. I tend to go up a ladder and wake up in an emergency room, so I mostly hold ladders steady and fetch nails. There are only about eight ladders, so there's a goodly number of us holding ladders and fetching nails and generally trying to find something to do.
We've reached a bottleneck and it's kind of frustrating. On the plus side, the wind has died down, the sun has been out all day and it's getting pretty seriously warm.
2:30 pm
In an effort to put us idle hands to work (lest the devil make us into his playhouses), it has been decided that we'll start putting on chicken wire. Basically, the entire outside of the building gets covered in chicken wire, so that when the stucco is put on, it has something to stucco to (it slides right off the OSB).
Chicken wire doesn't naturally stick to OSB, so it requires nails to keep it in place. But chicken wire does naturally "pooch up," so it tends to require a LOT of nails to keep it in place.
It takes a bunch of chicken wire for an ordinary Gateway house. This building is four times the size, so (according to some calculations) it will take about five times as much chicken wire (it's taller). So that's a HUGE amount of chicken wire. And it all needs to be cut first.
So Fr. Jim, Chris, Derrick and I put together the Fr. Jim's Patent Pending Chicken Wire Cutting Station, which consists of various farm implements used as axles, boards clamped to other boards used to measure out the proper length and two people armed with tin snips.
Once we get going, we can churn out a lot of properly sized pieces of chicken wire in a hurry. Which is not a good thing, because that means we have to go down and start nailing all the chicken wire to the building.
3:30 pm
Still nailing chicken wire to the building. There's about 20 of us working on it, and we look lost next to the size of this building. Seriously, it's like putting chicken wire all around Grand Central Station. Some of us are working in different area codes than others.
4:15 pm
And still we nail. The world is reduced to hexagonal patterns that demand nails from us. We have been nailing chicken wire all our lives and will always be nailing chicken wire. There is nothing but chicken wire.
4:40 pm
There's still lots of chicken wire to be nailed, but all the roof rafters have finally been put into place (which is what we were waiting for). So we can finally quit for the day!
"Yay!" is what we would say if we had any energy left, but we don't, so we say "Huh? Where's the chicken wire?" and stagger around for a while putting everything away.
6:00 pm
Tonight is the meal that everybody who's been on this trip before looks forward to: chicken mole! This is chicken with a secret chocolate sauce on it (and every cook has a secret mole recipe that's far better than any other mole; Fr. Dan calls it "the jazz sauce--no two versions come out the same").
We get drumsticks covered in a thick dark mole sauce that's so good, our toes are trying to climb up inside our stomachs to taste it.
It almost makes up for the chicken wire. Almost.
After dinner, we have our usual debriefing (turns out I wasn't the only one frustrated by lack of work; it was a common theme) and then we all stare blankly at one another before staggerig off to shower and sleep (not necessarily in that order).
Tomorrow: More chicken wire!
My job
I've had a couple of people here come up and ask me "Did your church really shut down so you could be here?"
Yup. The offices of Congregational Church on Mercer Island (CCMI) are shuttered this week (there's still church services and bible studies and meetings and such). My boss, Pastor Mark, said that this was Important and it wasn't like I was going to Mexico to drink beer and sun bathe (which is half right--I got a lot of sun today!).
So thanks to the CCMI folks, I'm down here yanking houses square using a van and eating Milk Candy Wafers made with goat milk. And nailing chicken wire.
Injury report
Kevin managed to place his thumb in front of a hammer with the predictable results. The story is that he was helping Kelly drive a nail and
simply hit the wrong nail. This didn't impair his driving, because he was driving in Mexico, and driving like a one-armed maniac is kind of the baseline state.
Oh, and don't ask him to show you which finger he injured. It's that one.
Robert
Juarez Hammer Time!