Day 4 the pace is starting to tell...

Today we rose at 6 a.m. as usual but there was a significantly less  amount of energy in our rising end MAC who had been coughing during the night definitely did not feel that good. We went to breakfast but there was a general feeling that everyone was feeling the pace of the heat and the workload. I felt really tired and drained. Nevertheless we proceeded to the site where the preparation for the application of stucco was well under way. We fixed a few small areas of the chicken wire which needed to be bedded against the bricks and then the stucco work started. This is back-breaking work and consists of filling a square board of wood on a short handle called a ‘hawk’ with stucco mixture which is the consistency of a thick gravy and then placing the hawk up to the wall and scraping off the stucco onto the wall with a ‘float’ or rectangular flat metal applicator and them smoothing it out over as much area as possible. This is not at all easy especially as the wall is rough and covered in somewhat uneven chicken wire.

There is a limit to the amount of stucco which can be held on the hawk with one hand while applying the stucco with the trowel in the other. Someone has to be there to fill the hawk every now and then when the stucco worker needs it. One wheelbarrow load of stucco after another keeps being mixed and has a very short life so has to be used quickly or it starts to thicken and set and is not workable on the wall. Thus it is an ‘all hands to the pumps’ job and even for the younger and fitter men they cannot sustain the work for a long period. Today was also very humid and debilitating and hot and meant that this also reduced energy levels and by late morning one could detect that some people were flagging. I just felt totally drained of energy and walking around seemed like hard labor. I have not felt like this before that I can recall. Any effort soon used up any residual energy that I had and even after a rest sitting down, I was not able to work for more than a few minutes, I quit and walked back to the hotel. The others followed not long after and lunch was served which was some delicious Indian food. Scott volunteered to take some of the more exhausted people to the beach for a swim in the afternoon but som returned to the site. MAC and I fell asleep for an hour and I decided in the interests of being of some use on the last day which is tomorrow, I would not go back to the site. At about 3.15 p.m., MAC did go back and I stayed in the house to write this. 

There was still some way to go on the last wall to be stuccoed before lunch but most of the inside had been completed and this was the last of the first coat of stucco. During the morning a team had been working in the carpentry shop cutting and measuring the members for the roof. There are 8 main beams and then the purlins which lay across them. The plan was to install the roof members in the late afternoon and this work would mean all other work on the ground would have to stop as the work above would entail the lifting of the heavy beam to the height of the top of the walls and then fixing in place. This will be dangerous work as the amount of safety possible on this remote site is limited and we just have to hope that people working at height with heavy lumber are very careful.

During the day we were visited by the local TV Channel and this is the interview they screened.

T.V at OSE CEB Micro-House Build

For me, this project was, perhaps a ‘bridge too far’ and I have not been able to contribute to the level that I really wanted to. I have just found that my upper body strength is far less than I thought it was and the amount of stamina I had has much diminished over the years. True, I have not been used to any sort of manual labor for many years and even the short work-outs I have at the gym are not nearly enough to get my muscles into the sort of shape for carrying even 5 gallon buckets of sand and soil around or even spreading stucco on walls at shoulder height. I have plastered walls before but around 40 years ago and plaster is somewhat lighter than stucco and even that experience, which I remember well, was very hard on the back muscles. The experience here has been great and very worthwhile but I would like to have contributed a lot more to the workload but my strength and technical knowledge were woefully short of that required. I would say that the description of the way in which the project would be conducted was quite different from the way it has done. This is not a criticism but just a stem Elmont. The work routine was much lighter in the description and the way in which the house would be built rather different. In the end, the amount of work was really beyond the capability of even the enthusiast sic and energetic crew which was assembled and we will not finish the house by Wednesday (tomorrow) the last day. There may be many reasons why we will fall short but one of them is not for want of trying. Many aspects of the house were not planned out in advance and thus had to be worked out on the spot. Allocation of labor tended to be a bit haphazard, despite the sterling efforts of Christine who tried her level best to assign people to task as a make sure that the workflow moved on but tiredness after the second day started to creep into some, especially those who were in their 50’s and 60’s and older. The heat, which was not too bad for the first couple of days ramped up for the fourth day really sapping energy and with it inertia and even some enthusiasm but I think this is temporary. People need a bit of a break and there hasn’t been one with early starts and late afternoon finishes. One can’t really work after about 5 or 5.30 p.m. here because the insects come out and eat you if you do. Then it is a quick shower, dinner and four most people, bed at around 8 p.m. Socializing is not really available unless you are prepared to forego rest. Some people did buy alcohol, mostly the local rum, to have a cocktail before dinner. Beer was also supplied every now and then.

There is no beach here at this resort despite the name ‘Bamboo Beach Resort”. Th resort is on an inlet of a river and there is water close by but those who have ventured in have found Dept and clinging mud almost like quicksand so not very inviting. There is a beach some way away and a group did go there this afternoon. Travel here is not always very straightforward and to get to the alternative accommodation where some of the group lives called Orchid Beach (a much smarter resort than this), you must traverse the river on a hand-cranked ferry boat in the evening to get to bed and in the morning to come back for yoga and breakfast. Still no one came on this trip for the accommodation and luxury!! A bed and a shower are the main needs when it comes to housing. One or two people are actually sleeping in tents in the grounds of Bamboo Beach which is hardy in the extreme.

Maybe the biggest ‘takeaway’ of this project for me has been the civility of the team. Lots of people have ideas and knowledge and have been generous in putting forward their views and remainder has been extremely respectful of others’ views and ideas and this pooling has helped the project enormously. The composition of the team is amazing and may or may not have been assembled as a result of luck or, we don’t know, some form of selection, (if the latter, I am sure that MAC and I would NOT have been selected!!). We have very experienced construction experts and we also have energetic people who have each been willing to turn their hands to anything they have been asked to do and this does demonstrate that a group fo humans can work together in harmony on a project such as this for the benefit of a community. We do not know if we are making a lasting impact on this community or even on any other community who may decide to build a CEB house or whatever iteration of Marcin’s creative imagination comes next, all we can say is we have tried our best with some peoples’ best being better or of more impact than others. I am disappointed by my performance but I have to accept that age does mean there will be some decline in one’s faculties and physical strength.

The title of one of the talks given by Marcin is “Collaborative Design of a Transparent and Inclusive Economy of Abundance”. That might be a version of the mission statement of Open Source Ecology. The fact that the plans of this building are available freely to anyone and the means of production within the economic limits of much of the world, renders this project truly equal to this precept. Is the design perfect and is it viable everywhere? perhaps at this stage not. Much has been learned from the experience here which builds on the experience gained from this CEB houses which have been built in the USA. Obviously, in Belize, availability of some of the components of the build as well as the climate and lack of other resources make this a more realistic test case for the under-developed world and this one more step forward in achieving the goals of open source design for the greater benefit.

MAC returned with news that the roof members weigh 800lbs each so getting them up to the top will be a challenge, perhaps for tomorrow. I hope that I am up for it.