Demolition!

1.16.19

1.16.19

Our house is CLEAN!!! We got up this morning ten minutes later than usual for both the breakfast crew and the eaters – 6:40 and 7:10 – we are SOOOOO wild!  We realized that our house was a mess so today’s camp crew left three members behind with Shawny, Jenny, and Sticky to turn the place around.  

Hope, Maddie, and Nils started from the top floor and brought sand down from every level until we got as much of it as possible out the door.  Shawny, Jenny, and Sticky joined in too.  We swept, mopped, gathered up laundry, cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms, and put away all of the dishes for the first time in a long time.  We even got out little fairy lights and strung them about so that when people reenter, they will feel like they are in a different place. Hopefully they will keep that “new” place neater (and less smelly!).  

We also moved the tents for the day to allow the grass underneath to get some sun.  It’s not dead under there yet (we moved them once already) so we hope if we let the grass breathe every once in awhile we can keep the yard alive.  There’s not enough room to totally move the tents elsewhere so we have to do our best. We also reduced our overall number of pop-up tents, which we are using as outdoor dressing rooms.  We had more than enough available to us so we folded a couple of them up to give us some more room in our backyard. 

We headed out to two worksites, because, as we already mentioned, the third one was on a bit of a lull. The other two sites realized that they had lots of work to do, so we headed to those. Some of us had not seen the other sites at all, so it was fun to check out what the experience of our group has been.  We were interested to hear from the PLs (Project Leaders) at each site how thrilled they are with our groups’ work.  

We know from past DIRT trips that we are a bit of a surprise, as most groups of college students don’t take things quite as seriously as we do.  It’s not that we don’t have fun, it’s just that when we work, we work really hard.  Most college students (or so we hear) do some work, dance and sing and run around a bit, and wear out in a couple of hours.  Or, they are so tentative about learning new tasks that they are reluctant to get things done without asking for permission/approval again and again and again. So, when an agency has a group of college student volunteers coming in, they plan accordingly.  

We tried to alert them that we were not going to be the kinds of college students that they expected. And now that we have heard from the project leaders at the different houses, we know that they have gotten the message.  In fact, they just didn’t have as many materials on hand as we needed, because they did not expect us to get as far as we have gotten in the time that we’ve been here.  

One house kept on cranking with tiling (even undoing and retiling a room that they thought was imperfect, as for us, “good enough is not good enough”) and at both of the houses we used up all of the available paint to cover everything we could.  The folks at each house actually put out distress calls to the other house looking for more work to do.  

Strangely, some of these under-utilized folks ended up at the “lull” house.  Jesse got a call that the bathroom tiles had arrived and that if someone knew how to run a wet saw (to cut the tiles), we could get that project going.  Some of us know how to run a wet saw, so we hurried over there.  Unfortunately, they had forgotten to get/send spacers with the tiles, which would make it hard to place them in a uniform way.  So, we were at a standstill again.  Until . . .

First some backstory. Yesterday, we learned that the house behind the “lull” house needed to come down.  It was damaged in Maria, its owner died a few days after Maria, and its roof had begun to collapse.  Further, the owners of the front house, Eugenio and Viviana, fear that the abandoned house has snakes in it (we didn’t see any), or that there is some other fearsome presence in there (a spirit of some sort? we didn’t see one of those either). They are related to whoever that prior owner was, and they were ready for that house to come down.  We bought some hard hats yesterday in case this proposal came to fruition.  

So, today when the tile job went dormant, Eugenio began to knock panels out of that house and those of us who were there donned hard hats, gloves, and safety glasses and joined in too. We convinced him to dismantle things slowly and systematically, taking into account the physics of the situation and the directionality of how things might fall.  We used old television wires to tie off some of the sections and pull them down from a safe distance.  We were extremely careful about clearing the space as big pieces got knocked out either by one of us or by our project leader, Sami.  We got the whole house down in about three hours.  

And then we heard that there were DIRTies out there without enough to do due to a lack of paint, so we had some of them come join us to clear the salvaged wood and other hardware and to create a big dump pile for the wood that was rotten or termite-ridden. And some of those boards were hosting entire societies of termites, moving around in a creepy mass and crawling into our gloves if we weren’t quick enough to stop them.  We managed to get almost down to the slab and will be able to complete the rest of the job tomorrow.  Lots of us got our first experiences with flat bars and sledgehammers as we took apart the wooden framing of the house and transferred it into one of our two piles (usable or not). 

As the DIRT team has experienced in many other disaster zones over the years, as soon as we declared any of the materials from the house to be “unusable,” someone would show up and pick through our basura (trash) pile and find things of use to them. Eugenio was fine with people taking some of the discarded stuff away, as he expects a large load hauler to come pick up the waste pile tomorrow.  

All of our houses will be up and running at full speed again tomorrow, and then Friday will be our last day with SBP.  After that, we will begin our full partnership with the community of San Isidro, which we have visited and studied throughout our stay.  

We will remind you that we love comments.  Every day, we ask to hear them read out loud.  So please join in!  

And we are trying to work out the date on which we will do our public presentations.  In case you’re not aware, each team produces three short media projects as their final work for this course.  We show at least one video from each team (and sometimes more than one if we can make it work) during an evening presentation at Saint Mary’s. We will try to get the date nailed down and announce it here quickly so you can plan to join us.  We would love to see you there!

Grayson and Chispa take a rest break.

Ana (homeowner) tends to a wound on Maddie’s foot.

Maddie getting ready for work!

Tom and Scott hold up a trim tile while Angle nails it in.

The group gets informed about the Rescates population in Puerto Rico.

Madison painting white primer with lazer focus.

Team work makes the dream work!

Alex and Jiandi playing a quite game of basketball.

View from the bus as we drive home after a long day of work.

An aerial photo of Loiza long after the sun went down!

Lindsay painting away!

Everyone at our seminar today!

Kitty trying to keep out of the sun!

Molly painting the exterior walls!

Alex painting the bathroom!