First Day of Building

Friday was our first day for building.  To get to the village where we are building, we needed to be at the ANSWER office by 8:30 am.  We left Pilgrims Guest House before 7:00 and did a combination of waking and riding in a packed city bus to get to the office.  Then we rode in an open truck in which about 35 of us were crammed like sardines all the way to the village.  Once on the road we bumped along and stopped several times to pick up more students.  

We saw many petro lines along the way.  It was amazing to see so many cars and trucks parked and no drivers in sight as they were just holding a lace in a line toward the fuel pumps that were not working.  There is a major blockage down on one border town with India, a political conflict within the region over a change in the constitution which was just adopted.  As a result the fuel for vehicles and gas for cooking has become more scarce.  Some restaurants have closed and the major high end tourist hotels are at only 25% capacity at the beginning of the tourist season!  This has affected Habitate for Humanity build projects that were to be happening now as they were not able to get materials.  This may affect our build down the road, but right now we have most of the supplies we need.

After about 90 minutes of being tossed around we arrived at a stream where the truck parked and we all jumped out and crossed the stream and walked about a half mile to the build site.  

The work had begun several days before we arrived so there was a deep trench already dug and drainage pipes were being laid.  Due to heavy rain on one of the previous work days they had covered the trenches and above you see the poles that had been used to support the tarps.  Our first job of the day was removing the tarps and moving the poles.

Here you can get a sense of the size of the future structure.  Actually two rooms with a space between.

The first part of the morning was spent leveling the drainage pipes so any water under the structure would be drained away.  After the pipes (with holes) were leveled they were covered with a landscape type cloth to keep gravel from filling the holes.  And then a substantial layer of gravel was laid on top of this.  We moved the gravel from the road to the trenches by bucket brigade.

Here two of the girls are handing off a bucket.  It looks small but it was plenty heavy enough.

This is the lineup for the buckets.  Usually about 20 of us were passing the buckets.  It would involve the full buckets in an outgoing direction and returning buckets sometimes meeting at the same person who had to grab the empty bucket with one hand and a full one with the other and swing them in opposite directions.

Our lunch was prepared on site and was dal bhat, the traditional Nepalese meal.  

We have rice cooking in the big pot and the yellow colored stuff in the small pan was lentils.

This is one huge pot of rice.

Yummy food, and we were hungry!

Here one of the Answer staff is serving two of the girls some extra food.

Here you can see the gravel being dumped into the trench.

Oops, never told you that we are building a "dirt bag" structure.  These are very stable in earthquakes and that is why this construction method as chosen.

After all the gravel was level we placed these bags filled with more gravel down into the trench.  These were then tamped down and made level.

The bags each took five buckets of gravel.  We used plastic buckets with the bottoms cut out to serve as an oversized funnel.  After the bags are filled they are sown shut using wire.  David was serving as the tamper for the bags and generally supervised the filling process.

After a long day and a drive back into the city in the dark we ate dinner in the guest house and all of us went to bed early.