Real Life and Faith: Mexico…Tuesday

Today I was on the worksite...their project is building a retaining wall. Mostly we carted stone. We filled and carried buckets with gravel. We shoveled sand. (Understand, the men and boys could fill a five-gallon bucket with sand or gravel, swing it up onto their shoulders, and carry it to the concrete pile. Americans could carry a half-bucket or third bucket…we carried our small loads and filled buckets to the top when we got there.) I'd like to say we are helping them, but really, I'm not at all sure we are.

One of our team members who grew up working construction said this was about as far from American construction as you could get. Not so far from Noah construction. In America, concrete comes premixed. You construct the forms and the company pours in the mixture. In Mexico, the recipe is...

100 five-gallon buckets of sand (henceforth, buckets)
30 buckets of gravel (made by sifting a rock pile into sand and gravel...shovels full into a wood and wire sifter. Shake, shake, shake sand into one wheelbarrow. Dump gravel into the other wheelbarrow.

If you every watched someone make pasta, it's the same concept. The sand is shoveled into a circle with a depression in the center. Then 50 pound bags of concrete (which the men carry down the hill, BTW, one at a time on their backs. I never counted the bags...but six or eight. Folks circle the circle of sand and shovel, turning the concrete into the sand until it is all mixed.

Then gravel, 30 buckets, or as we often did, 30 gringo buckets and a couple extra to cover the ones we didn't fill to the top. (Do you know how heavy a five gallon bucket of sand/gravel is?...just saying...). Then the shovels again and a hose that adds water continuously to the mix. The shovels concentrate in one area now, mixing the concrete and filling, you guessed it...buckets. About a third shovel...the others carry these buckets of concrete to the ditch and pour it in. Thus, the footings are poured.

No one here needs to go to the gym.