After another good breakfast at camp, we headed out to the
worksite. Now that the walls have
reached ten bricks high, the brickwork has to be done on scaffolding for the remaining
seven rows of bricks. That means that
only a limited number of people can actually do brick work. A few more are needed to hand stuff up to the
masons and their assistants on the scaffolds.
As on previous days, the bulk of the work continues to be
moving bricks, sand, cement and water.
Around 11:30, another truck load of materials arrived – 300 bricks to
the lower house, 300 to the middle and 1,000 to the upper, plus 20 more bags of
cement. Today, we were able to convince
the truck driver to turn around and back up the hill as far as possible. This allowed us to make a human chain and
take the bricks off the truck and directly into each house.- only one hour of
handling bricks.
Except we put 400 bricks into the middle house and 900 to
the upper. After lunch we moved that
last 100 while not interrupting the work on laying bricks. Because the hill is so steep, the path to the
upper hill goes to the right about 50 feet, then crosses back across the face
of the hill about 75 feet to get to the house.
I scrambled up the hill to the middle of the steepest spot and found a
place where I could get my footing. This
allowed a short line of only six people (instead of all 16 as we had been doing
when unloading from the truck). Bricks
were handed out of house two, the older Mike would toss them up to me and I
would make a long toss up to young Mike.
We did fifty this way, then I swapped positions with the older
Mike. Much quicker and much easier.
Patty has enjoyed working with the mason Augusto, whom she
has nicknamed Maestro. She is great at
placing the mortar in the vertical spaces between the bricks. And also at cleaning up the tools at the end
of the day – she uses a piece of an empty cement bag as a rag to scour the
tools and wheelbarrows of remaining cement and mortar.
Other than moving those 100 bricks from the middle house to
the upper house, my afternoon was more moving sand and bricks, also moving the
scaffolding from the lower house to the upper house. At a lull in the action, the older Mike and I
took a walk into town to explore la ferrerteria - the local hardware
store. They had a limited selection of
hand tools, paints, nails and screws, and some building supplies, and it
appeared that they could order other things if you needed them.
As with Monday and Tuesday, Zenon brought a case of 12
Casqueña beers. On the prior days, it
was hard to get the people laying bricks to stop and come have beer – they need
use of the mortar that was already mixed and then clean their tools. Today, I brought four bottles of beer to the
upper house crew and poured them beer as they finished up work. They were a much happier crew.
Back at camp, we had another nice dinner. After dinner, Zenon showed a video about the
Nazca line, but Patty and I did not attend.
She need the Tylenol PM and I went back to my room to finish packing my
suitcases. After working on the houses,
Friday we will be leaving La Florida. It
has been a hard week, but good progress has been made on the walls of the three
houses.
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