Rebar

1.22.19

Special Note: We finally have a date for our final video presentation night: Wednesday, February 20, from 7-8:30pm (or so) in Galileo 201 on the Saint Mary’s College campus. We look forward to meeting all of the families and friends of our amazing DIRT team.  Each of our teams will present at least one of its three final videos (maybe more than one if there is time).  Please join us!  

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Work day.  For real.  CalTrans, look out!  We headed out to San Isidro after a lovely breakfast combining real eggs and powdered eggs so well that we couldn’t tell that anything was different.  We added tomatoes and red peppers and garlic paste and olives, along with gouda cheese freshly grated by Steph.  We even heated up the leftover tilapia and some people ate fish breakfast burritos.  The vegans (we have two, plus one vegetarian) ate yucca and broccoli.  All of that great food prepared us well to hit the worksite with gusto.

We had two primary jobs: prep a recently-constructed plywood house for occupancy and deal with the enormous potholes and ruts in the San Isidro roads.  Both of these jobs are going to be doozies.  

On the first one, we are doing follow-up work on a house built by an organization called Techos, who came through after Maria and helped build a large number of small homes on lots where existing homes were lost.  The way we have heard it, the homes cost $400 to build and are all the exact same model.  They have piers that support them, small raised porches, and three rooms that are probably seen as a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room.  They do not have bathrooms, but many people add bathrooms after the initial construction is complete.  Others no doubt use outhouses.  They do not have windows either.  But practically everyone adds vented windows.  Some add trim and almost everyone paints them.  

This particular house belongs to the grandmother of our friend Joshua, who has been riding in our bus with us when he is not in high school.  His grandmother is blind and will need some special accommodations to make this house work for her.  Joshua’s grandfather Jose is a contractor and is our supervisor on this project.  We have yet to figure out whether these grandparents are (or were) a pair or not.  Maybe tomorrow. 

“Our” Techos house has one window already and we will help install at least one more.  It needs some interior doors and it needs a bathroom.  It needs an entrance ramp to replace the steps that come with the house.  It also needs some yard clearing, which is a bigger job than usual because someone seems to have used this particular yard for their debris pile.  There are lots of debris piles that have never been picked up throughout the city and San Isidro is no exception. 

We hope to help with all of this work.  Today, though, we began by fastening down the outer plywood on the highest walls of the house.  We also bagan painting the entire exterior of the house a light taupe color.  We suggested that maybe the porch could include a pop of color and Jose came back with a gallon of purple-ish lavender paint that did the trick.  We also wrestled with that debris pile, including lots and lots of rebar that is tangled into a web in a way that we just don’t understand. We took on that web today, but didn’t conquer it yet.  Still, we made big progress for one day of work. 

On the roadwork, we were aware that we were going to help repair potholes.  We were not aware that they had access to a bobcat and an excavator, and imagined that we would just be filling holes with rocks, trying to cement them in some way, and maybe not improving things all that much.  HA!  

We were a full-on road crew, taking a rutted, janky, uneven surface and turning it into a smooth, flat, passable road in just a few hours.  We were mad people with shovels, digging channels for water to run elsewhere and bringing in fill for the machines to smooth.  And we were FILTHY by lunchtime.  But that road had turned into a legitimate throughway for the community. Unbelievable!

At lunch we reorganized a bit and a few people flipped from the house job to the road job and vice versa. Both jobs went in largely different directions after lunch.  The house crew had a few people doing siding and painting but the majority of us worked on that debris pile and the web of rebar, trying to make a pathway to the side of the house.  Perhaps one of the most important points that this group learned is that the word is “rebar” and not “rebarb” (or “rhubarb”) or “barbed wire.”  

And Scott and Alex became a siding machine, doing precision work from the blind side (exterior) of the house, with Shawny inside calling out instructions and rough measurements of where they should drill.  The Techos folks give no leeway in their use of materials, obviously having figured out the most economical way for things to get done as quickly as possible.  So the plywood siding sheets have to be screwed perfectly into studs/crossbeams that are atypically far apart, meaning that things only attach along the extreme outer edges, with no wiggle room. No professionals could have done a better job than Scott and Alex did today. 

As for the road crew, things weren’t quite as smooth (pun intended) as the morning crew’s work had been. The part of the road they were fixing was full of rainwater, so they were channeling it away as the morning crew had done.  Our community partner Luis, however, added a new twist to the afternoon job when he dug a hole for the water to drain toward off of the side of the road.  Though to us it appeared that the hole was in an empty/abandoned lot, the neighbors of that lot seemed to disagree with that assessment.  A forceful argument ensued between those neighbors and Luis, who is seen as one of the primary leaders of the community.  We didn’t catch the whole argument, as it was in Spanish, and none of us has good enough language skills to follow a very heated discussion.  In any case, the road crew suddenly found itself putting more time into undoing Luis’ new drainage hole than into the road. As far as we could tell, Luis kept the conversation going with the neighbors throughout our work, and the other main leader of the community, Jossie, also joined in. It was clear that both Luis and Jossie considered it important to continue the discussion with those neighbors for as long as it took to come to an agreement of some sort. We’re not sure what that agreement was, but we expect to learn tomorrow.

We talked a lot about this exchange in our reflection session tonight, as we at first couldn’t believe that anyone could object to something that was so clearly making the community better.  But then we kept thinking and talking about who gets to decide what’s “better” and when that “better” thing happens.  We know that the community has expressed a deep desire for the roads to be improved, but on the day that it actually happens, all of the noise and commotion might not be totally welcome.  We also acknowledged that this community has experienced high levels of frustration and there every reason that “roadwork day” could spark those frustrations in new (or old) ways.  In any case, pure consensus is quite difficult to achieve and we had good evidence that the expressed will of the community did not necessarily come in at 100% support.  

In the late afternoon, we packed things up and hurried back to the community center where we distributed Kings’ Day presents, as we expected some kids to show up for our planned games and workshops.  Only five kids came today, so we made this afternoon all about the games.  We played tag, hide-and-seek, and “steal the bacon,” all of which had both the San Isidro kids and us running around laughing and smiling for a full two hours or so.  When dusk started to fall, we realized that we needed to let the kids head home.  We started to do a little huddle to send them off, and Angel had the brilliant idea to countdown and yell “San Isidro!”  Hopefully you will see it in the video. 

We awarded the purple bike tonight to another person who already has received this great honor: Scott. His work on the siding today had all of us in awe.  As it turns out, most of Scott’s work has all of us in awe, especially because, as Jesse noted, Scott is so consistently excellent in all that he does.  All of us talked about how impressed we are with him and his leadership style and the newcomers in particular were effusive in their descriptions of him as a role model.  Alex, our Stillman colleague, gave a particularly touching tribute to Scott, pointing out that when they first met, it was already clear that they would be friends.  Scott has been central to all of our successes in preparing and pulling off this trip. The fact that he is quiet and humble throughout all of his impactful contributions just makes working with him even better.  Thanks a million, Scott!
Photos from Tortugas

This is the kitchen where Jossie and her team cook lunch for us.

Scott and Alex busy screwing in the wooden walls at Josè’s house in San Isidro. 

The team is painting away the inside and outside of Jose’s house.

This was one of many things from the ground after cutting a bunch of leaves from Josè’s house.

Tom and Stephane piling up lots of weeds that’s been cut throughout the day in San Isidro. 

Maddie stirring the paint before we paint the outside of the house!

We found a centipede while filling the holes in the road!

Lindsay moving dirt around!

Louis driving a bobcat to smooth out the road!

This was one of the holes we had to fill today!