We went to the school site today and stood the walls. Tomorrow we will level and plumb the walls, dry pack the bottom plate, and stand the trusses. An ambitious amount of work for one day, but our goal is to get at least a few trusses up.
We are struggling to figure out how to balance local's involvement with the build vs volunteer involvement vs expediency. Volunteers want to help, obviously - it's what they came to do. HODR (soon to become All Hands Volunteers) wants locals to be involved to both teach them some labor skills and create a sense of ownership of the school. Expediency...well, that's all me wanting to get the job done, get out of the sun, and move on to the next nail, stud, wall, school, etc.
It's a complex equation that I've never had to tackle before but I think I've already hit on a solution: instead of pre-building the walls at the base and arriving onsite to stand them I'm thinking we precut everything at the base, do the plate layout, etc, then transport the walls as bundled packages to the site. Once onsite a small army of locals can all be involved in nailing studs into place. A smaller and more select crew (ie, a higher volunteer to local ratio, where clear communication gets more important for quality and safety) can stand the walls.
There's more to hash out obviously, and refinements as this is off the cuff stuff, but it's a good start I hope. Meetings to follow I suppose. I've been tentatively asked if I'd like to head up the next school build. My first thought was "I'd better start learning Creole with a vengeance - that would lessen MANY of the issues the build crew face!"
One of our crew from Scotland leaves today and it was his wish that he get to see a school build to the point of being able to get onsite and nail some walls upright. Despite severe intestinal troubles (yes, on his last day in Haiti...sigh) he was there. We all made sure he was there putting nails in the first corner in the morning and the last corner at the end of the day. He (Steve) is returning home and has announced he is going to begin fundraising the $20k to send to All Hands to build another school
6am now...our crew leaves earlier than the others so I must sign off and get to work. I will upload tonight. Tomorrow is our day off and I'm planning to build a platform for the tent so I'm out of the flood plain.
Pam: YES, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU you wonderful human being you!
Thank you for all the comments on the previous entries. Keep those up, please, as it's a moral booster for me to not only know the blog is being read but also to hear you thoughts, insights, and encouragements. YOU are an important part of the process as you support me with your energy and intention.
For those interested here are the coordinates of the school build location:
18°32'4.48"N
72°35'35.11"W
The white pad is the school concrete pad that we are building on. The building to the right is the school (with the half roof) and the building further to the right with the corrugated tin roof is the Pastor's home. We wheel the generator into his one room home so that is stays safe. The Pastor's wife cooks for us as we are much too far from base to return for lunch. Today we even had a lacey white tablecloth laid over the rustic table upon which was laid out rice and beans, fresh chicken, a thin soup with a few potato chunks and a carrot, a warm fruit juice. In fact today she stayed to cook for us while the Pastor went to his sister's wedding. We felt a bit bad about that...seemed that she should have been able to go along with him for such a specicial occasion, but that, I suppose, only goes to show the importance of the building of the school to them.
Today, Saturday (so technically this is the beginning of t+7 report) we were able to level the building (the slab was out of whack a whopping 5.5 inches), rack the walls plumb, line the wall (site them for straight), and add the second top plates.
Tomorrow is our 1 day/week off so on Monday we will dive in with a few more top plates then stand the roof trusses. We also have a LOT of packing of concrete under the bottom plate to get contact with the slab. We will install foundation bolts after the trusses are up...that's a tad bassakwards but should still work okay as long as we lock the dry packed concrete in nicely.
Still no darn photos. Tomorrow I will take some around the base and that will get my trigger finger in the groove. I've got audio I could send, but don't think this blog site takes that either. Perhaps I'll have time to figure out another means to transmit that on to y'all.
