Working It

We have finally been joined on site by a pedreiro (or building master) named Joam from the city. He has been working in the field of construction for 30 years but never with a woman or with Americans, both circumstances he seems to welcome. The communication was very difficult at first as he didn’t speak the clearest Portuguese (Ethan went so far as to claim that he was speaking another language, altogether) and our Portuguese is relatively slow but soon enough we were able to understand each other and communicate by showing/doing as much as possible. One of our biggest challenges is to keep up with the pedreiro’s very fast pace of working. This requires that we adapt quickly to his work methods while foreseeing the next step in the process. Once finishing all of the bond beam rebar towers and remaining column rebar towers, the next logical step for Joam was the exterior veranda columns (pier footing, rebar, retention brackets, mortar, oito furo bricks). In the meantime, we poured all footings for interior columns, constructed formwork, and began to pour the columns (composed of wood formwork greased with expired soy bean oil, vertical rebar, rebar retention brackets, rebar braces (15 X 20) to hold the formwork in place, and concrete). Another major task on site concerns the water team. They have been working away (with the helping hands of GIEU students) on the construction of the septic tank/leeching facility which is made from oito furos with the occasional brick turned sideways in order to let materials seep through. They have also been cleaning materials for their water filtration system. Both of these tasks are near completion. We also fetched the wood from deep in the forest where it had been cut and moved it to the roadside. This required a lot of bug spray and some night time adventures to move the wood from the side of the road to the building site.

Clockwise: Our “metal shop”: cutting rebar for the rebar towers, bending rebar retention brackets, assembling rebar towers; All hands on board for the pouring of the first column (we were determined to pour it that day and were trying our hardest to beat dusk); Construction of a veranda column; Placement of formwork for interior column