The day began by fixing up the area where work has been started. The digging for the foundation had been completed and there were small to semi-large rocks strewn about that needed to be collected into neat piles. Then came the making of the reinforcing for the concrete footers that were to be put in place. This involved cutting pieces of #4 or #5 rebar with a handsaw and arranging them into grid pieces. These two tasks did not take too long and were relatively painless. The cutting of the rebar was somewhat difficult, but there were several people to share with the cutting.
Cutting the rebar
Tying the rebar together
Then came the difficult part: bringing the sand and gravel for the concrete to the site. Casa Rosinda is located at the very top of the neighborhood and amidst some of the roughest street terrain. It is very difficult to drive a regular truck through here, much less a dump truck with a load of sand and gravel.
The road that Casa Rosinda is located on
The solution was to dump the pile about 150-200 meters from the site, which was down the street and up a steep hill. To do this job we had some 5-gallon buckets, a wheelbarrow, and some more 5-gallon buckets that some of the neighbors lent to us. The first few loads went ok; taking two ¾ full buckets, one for each hand, easing down the hill, and then trying to use the momentum of the hill to power through the straightaway to the house. After about 5 loads, my arms, which have not had any exercise for some time, began to weaken. The muscles in my lower arm that control the fingers began to give out and I’d have to set the buckets down. I didn’t feel so bad because some of the others had similar problem, plus it was a very humid day, so dehydration was setting in. It was hard work but it was also fun being a spectator for the neighborhood.
After the first few loads, I was approached by a neighbor who asked me something in hard-to-understand Spanish. I told him I couldn’t understand and if he could repeat it slowly. After a few more tries he resorted to “tu quieres?” and made a smoking gesture. I made a slightly confused face, at which point he opened up his hand and showed me a bag with some crack in it. I politely refused and kept going with my buckets. On the next bucket load the same guy had moved across the street and was smoking a joint while he watched us.
A few days earlier I had gone to the same neighborhood with Roberto and Fernando, the two students who are in charge of 10x10, and we had seen the police had just arrested a man and had hopped on some horses to go up into the neighborhood to round up some more people. The drug aspect is very important in the north of Mexico. In my Contemporary Mexico class, we had a discussion last Thursday about how the presence of drugs, drug corruption, and general “other” areas of society are acknowledged in Mexico, but they are not spoken of, outside of major politics that is. It is almost a taboo subject. The professor made it clear to us foreign students that although the class felt comfortable speaking about this stuff in the class, once they got outside it just simply was not done. This was due to violence that has occurred and the fact that you never really know what the person you are talking to is involved in. This can be explored more with the phenomenon that many of Mexico’s musicians, especially in the north, have been killed in the past years because of drug related disagreements. I really do not know enough to go on about the subject, but relating all this information to how this man who offered me the drugs somewhat fits together. In a part where tourists or outsiders hardly ever go, the person offering was not very blatant about what he was offering. He probably used a phrase that implied something, but it fell on very un-understanding ears. However, a few days later when I was in Puerto Vallarta, a very tourist oriented place, a guy from across the street yelled at me offering some weed in both Spanish and English. Is there any substance here (no pun intended) or am I just making random connections, I’m not really sure. But it is interesting how these things seem to come together.
The following Saturday I again joined in for some 10x10 work and this time it was back to experimentation and investigation. As mentioned earlier, the walls for Casa Rosinda are going to be constructed from concrete formwork. The structure is going to be metal, and some more investigation needed to be made to finalize the design. Another project is also going to be using the formwork as the material, but the option of a wood structure is being investigated. My job for this Saturday was to help construct a panel made out of wood. Overall it was a good process, although the sizes and measurements were not determined until after I made the first cuts based on the measurements on the drawing. So the panels were not perfect, but they were good enough for the test. The main test was to see what kind of connection to use, and during this investigation it became apparent how difficult a multilingual jobsite can be.
The connection in question involved a 2x4 butting up against a 4x4. The first option was to simply nail them together, but it resulted in an awkward connection. My friend Janet, who goes to Purdue and has started joining us, made a suggestion that I understood as using two angles to put the pieces together. Then I suggested using what I called nailing plates which are used to put trusses together (I guess they’re really called mending plates). It turns out this is what Janet was trying to describe to me in English. So now that we were on the same page, the challenge became to convey the idea in Spanish. Eventually I ended up going to Home Depot to explain what we meant. It was a good suggestion because it turned out being the cheapest method of connecting the pieces.
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