Hot Times in Juarez Trip Log--Day 3: Victory is mine
rob...@robertgidley.com
Tue, Feb 17, 2009
6:00 am
My alarm on my cell phone is a quiet short chirp that sounds vaguely like a bird. Unless you know it's an alarm, it's easy to miss and sleep through (and sometimes I have). That's on purpose--I don't want to disturb other folks when my alarm goes off.
Fr. Dan has an iPhone, and he has his alarm set to sound like an emergency klaxon aboard a submarine. Fortunately, my alarm went off first. Unfortunately, he wasn't in his room when his alarm went off (he had taken off for the showers).
So, as I was struggling awake, part of my brain was screaming "Dive! Dive! Dive!" I was awake enough to stagger into his room and figure out how to disable the alarm (sadly, iPhones don't have easily accessible battery packs, as that is usually my first choice).
And he was dutifully embarrassed when he returned from the showers. But as long as we were both awake, we chatted (also, we were the only ones awake).
In all the ten years that Fr. Dan has been doing this mission of building houses in the poor part of Juarez, he's only had one "failure." In that case, the family decided they couldn't make it and sold their house after a year to another family in the same church. That's it.
I worked for 16 months at a homeless shelter for families in Salem (Oregon). We could accomodate four families at a time, and during the time I was there we served maybe 50 families. Fr. Dan's "failure" would have been a "resounding success" for us.
Homelessness in Juarez is fundamentally different than it is in the US. These people don't have homes because there's a shortage of homes, not because they don't have jobs (many of them do), or the desire to work (ditto), or a community to support them (mondo ditto).
That's one of the cool things about building houses in Juarez through Fr. Dan. Local pastors choose community members who will benefit from receiving a house (Fr. Dan doesn't get involved in the choosing--it's all done by Mexican clergy). The folks we build houses for are good, hard-working folks who will treasure the house, and keep it up, and benefit from the gift.
Yeah, it's selfish for me to want "good" people living in the house that I sweated to build. But, frankly, after working hard to help people who don't care, it feels pretty good.
6:45 am
There are three people named "Daniel" around here, so the new kid from New Jersey gets nicknamed "Jersey Dan" (or sometimes "Jersey Kid" or just "Kid"). He graduated from high school last year and decided to spend a year exploring mission opportunities. He's working with some organizations in Juarez to teach English to Mexican kids.
Basically, he's the kind of kid you want your kids to grow up to be.
He was explaining to me about Mexican culture. Where Americans tend to be task oriented, Mexicans are relationship oriented. When somebody stops by that they want to talk to, they will stop working and focus on the relationship by talking to them.
Which, to us task-oriented Americans, looks like laziness, but it's just a different set of priorities.
7:55 am
We're breakfasted, and dressed (no showers--you shower at night after a day of work) and coffeed up (yay!) and ready for our second day of work. After loading up the van, we head over towards the work site.
One of the advantages of riding in Guinea Pig Ed's van and sitting in the front is getting mini-lessons in Spanish. (It is not a good idea to ride in the back of the van that Ed is driving, unless your spine needs compressing.)
Today's lesson is "bodega" and "abarrote." In Mexico, a corner store (think "7-11") is an abarrote. A "bodega" is a warehouse. In every other Spanish-speaking country (Latin American, South America) a "bodega" is a small store.
Which explains why all the corner stores (and there are a LOT of them) have "abarrotes" painted on the front of them.
9:00 am
Our roof is still sitting in the road (yay!) and we're ready to get to work! It's clear and sunny today, and it's rapidly warming up. Our first order of business is standing around, trying to remember where we left off, yesterday.
Oh that's right, OSB (Oriented Strand Board, or what common folks call "walls"). We're still nailing chunks of that on the walls, so things start out pretty noisy. And actually never quiet down all day.
10:00 am
Our roof comes in four sections, so that we can pick them up and move them over to the side of the house and lift it up and push it over the side and onto the top of the house. This involves pretty much everybody either picking it up or being on the inside moving it into position (or both).
Repeat this four times and the frame for the roof is in place! Now people who are light weight and nimble (that is: not me) go up on the roof and nail OSB onto the top of the house to form some shade for those of us still nailing it to the side of the house.
The other thing we add is "Hurrican Straps," which apparently keep the roof from blowing away when it gets windy.
10:30 am
Whew! Is it lunch time yet? Seems like we've been working for hours. Ed and I head over to the abarrote and get some packages of cookies, take them back to the site and declare a "sugar break" so that we'll all have energy to make it to lunch time.
11:15 am
It's now time for the chicken wire. The idea is that all the walls of the house are covered in chicken wire that's nailed down. Then stucco (a lightweight cement) is applied and covers up the chicken wire, which gives it something to hold on to.
The house is 16 feet wide by 28 feet long (we measured to calculate how much chicken wire we needed). Which works out to about 31 eight foot long chunks of chicken wire. And approximately seven billion nails.
When I first ran into chicken wire three years ago, it basically reduced me to tears because it was impossible to nail and there was acres of it and during the debrief I lashed out and called it "rat-bastard chicken wire." The teenagers got big eyes, but all the grownups nodded and said "rat-bastard chicken wire."
Since then, it has been known by one and all as "rat-bastard chicken wire." A designation that it earned.
Anyway, the first step in dealing with R-B chicken wire is to cut 31 strips of it, which is a joy all in itself, as once you cut it (with tin snips), you have a strip full of pokey bits that wants to curl itself back into a roll.
Fortunately, Carlos is back to help, and has brought some friends and they quickly figure out the most efficient way they can contribute: they hold down the ends while we're cutting and run the finished strips back to the staging area. (These kids would make great engineers if they could get an education.)
So the cutting part goes fairly smoothly.
12:00 noon
Our cutting is interrupted by lunch! And by a somewhat more noxious by-product of previous lunches. Most of the windage was being broken by a particular pair of missionaries, whose names you can probably guess.
But the happy part is that we have a nice shady place to eat our lunch: inside the house! The roof is now covered and the walls are up, so we can pull up a nearby ladder and chow down on some of Mogale's Magic Burritos (today's special seems to include a pork and potato selection, and every day we have a different type of hot sauce).
1:00 pm
We've put off nailing up R-B chicken wire as long as we can, so it's time to begin. I'm a little nervous as I put the first nail to the OSB. Will it just pop out again? Will the R-B chicken wire rip the hammer from my hands and stomp on it?
Ha. Instead the nail leaps from my hand and into the OSB, waiting for the hammer to make a quick visit and seal the deal. I'm just watching while the nails are going in by themselves.
Take that, you R-B chicken wire!!!
2:00 pm
Working on one side of the house with Karin and Fr. Jim. It's a little hard to make conversation with all the pounding going on, but we manage the occasional snippet. Mostly, it's just nice to have somebody else around grumbling about dropped nails (they're itty-bitty suckers) and poofed up sections of wire.
2:40 pm
One of the reasons why we need 4 trillion nails for the chicken wire is that the nails are spaced four inches apart. That's what Fr. Jim says, anyway, "We've always done it that way," (a very Episcopalian thing to say).
Fr. Dan comes by and says, in his low key way, "Y'all are using an awful lot of nails."
Um, okay Fr. Dan, how far apart should the nails be?
Well, it turns out they should be about the distance between thumb and pinky (and I have an octave and a third reach). Another way to put this: we've been using FOUR TIMES AS MANY NAILS AS WE HAD TO!
This is just icing on the cake and ice cream for me. Not only the nails driving themselves, I can go four times faster. And, it turns out, we get a lot fewer pooches, because nailing them so close together was causing more problems than it solved.
It takes Fr. Jim a while to adjust, though. After all, this is the fourth year he's been doing it this way, and it wrecks his whole rhythm to do things differently.
3:00 pm
Somebody in the group discovered that "haboob" means "a sand storm, especially in a desert" (since I can't get to the real Internet, I'll take their word for it).
We've been getting the tar haboobed out of us today, especially this afternoon. Juarez is a desert, filled with fine sand. Karin used to be a field geologist, and Fr. Jim asked her what she saw when she looked around. She said that she saw almost no support for houses and was amazed that anybody would build here.
When you're in a desert filled with fine sand and the wind blows, the sand gets picked up and whipped through the air and ends up in everything. We're lucky that the house we're building is about five feet from the house next door, so we're not getting the full force of the wind.
Even so, it's unpleasant, and even though we're supposed to be keeping open minds and hearts, we can't help thinking "Why would anybody live here?? What's wrong with these people?"
Still, it is fun to hear people holler "Haboob!" when the wind starts picking up.
5:30 pm
Back at the mission center, Fr. Dan mentions that a PBS producer has contacted him about possibly featuring him in a series about "Do Gooders." Nothing is set, yet, and Dan's not sure what the name of the show is (except that it somehow involves Hugh Downs).
I'll be sure to let you know if anything happens, so you can see that I'm really not making up anything I say about Fr. Dan. Who is, technically, no longer an Episcopalian, but is now a Anglican Nigerian priest (I call him a "spammer priest"), but he's still a cool guy.
6:30 pm
After dinner, Fr. Dan explains to my table about the current unrest in Juarez. Basically, for the first time, the drug trade has been interdicted from both sides of the border. Not only has the US cracked down, but the Mexican government has also decided to take back control.
As Fr. Dan put it, "There's all these pigs around the trough and suddenly the trough got a lot smaller." The easiest way to get more (or even the same) is for the pigs (the drug traffickers) to eliminate the other pigs.
"Essentially, what's going on is a RIF--the drug business can't support this many people, so they're eliminating employees." The violence has been limited almost exclusively to people involved in the drug trade (or on their payroll).
Adding to matters is that with all the shootings, the police department is overwhelmed and can't even begin to investigate all the murders. So, if you have a grudge against somebody and they live in Juarez (and you're a bad guy), now is an excellent time to make your move and make it look like a by-product of the drug war.
Fr. Dan also points out that if the violence ever moves outside the drug trade (starts affecting American tourists, or regular Mexican workers) that things will get very hot very fast. "You can't put more boots and guns on the ground than the Army can, so you will lose."
Tomorrow: How dry wall I am
Robert
Hot times in Juarez Trip