I woke up super sluggish because I didn’t actually ever really want to face this day. The day that I’m the lead on a project and I have no idea what I’m doing. Heck, I haven’t even seen the site, excavated or non-excavated!
We got up early to go to the grocery store, only to find we were half an hour early, so we had the kids go to the Saturday market (we’re lucky everything is right outside our door). Since we’re not staying with the community, like legit in their school or church, we lose a huge cultural experience. We won’t be playing soccer after work, nor seeing our comrades walking up and down the street. We also won’t all be roughing it as a team, and be away from all internet. Yes, it’s more comfortable in a hotel, but we do lose a lot of what this is supposed to be about, unfortunately. That’s just the reality of an urban project versus a rural one I guess.
We finally ate breakfast and as we were finishing up, I turned around and saw a Mayan woman that looked familiar, so I smiled and waved (my midwestern is coming back), and went back to my food. My brain nerves finally connected though, and I realized it was Petronila, the presidente of the community!! I immediately got up and hugged her and made sure everyone said hi, and she informed us that our truck was ready- right at 8:30 like we asked, never happened before!!! This community rocks. We finished up real quick and were off. We finally got to the site, and there were probably 20 community members working on excavation. Great. We get there to assess, and finally figure out that we only want 0.2m deep instead of 0.5m. Great. Unfortunately they had dug a donut shape to begin, so it’s not like we could just say “hey stop digging” because it wasn’t level at all. So as they finished that, we started on rebar. We taught the kids how to cut and bend, and we finished all the L-bars for the foundation-wall connection. Pretty good. I think they maybe kinda hate rebar now, but that’s just not allowed on this project, there’s far too much steel going on.
That was honestly basically the whole day- excavation and rebar. It was so nice to be with everyone again though- to finally see José and Mincho and Maria, that was really really nice. And having a PBJ with lime-flavored Tortrix just brought me back to last year and good times.
Work-day-wise, I was honestly kinda disappointed with where we ended up: were supposed to get on site tomorrow with excavation finished. We’ll see how that goes... either way, I think things will move faster as the days go on.
BUT when we got back to the hotel, Mike (aka EWB/UN engineer guru) was there. He came to help with our project, since this is the largest tank our office has ever done (good thing we’re super new to this). We talked through some design/construction stuff, as well as catch up with him and hear stories of his recent emergency work (EWB usually stays away from emergency work... until two weeks ago when we signed an agreement with the UN what!!). Mike was SUPER cool about his approach and methodology. He said he wants EWB to be able to go to disaster-struck areas and assess the engineering/construction/inspection capacity of the area. AKA he wants to seek out skilled professionals who, along with everyone else, have had everything they’ve known destroyed, and would have the time/skill set/passion to help rebuild effectively. MUCH better than bringing in gringos and/or white folk. At the table with the UN, the president of St. Dominica, and other lead aid organizations, Mike was the only engineer present, and he was able to say with credibility, “why do you want to ship in 40 engineers when we have 60 skilled engineers right here on the island?? Here’s a list of names that I’ve spoken with and can stand behind their skill set.” He also trained bankers (i.e., the people who give out loans for houses. These houses are now destroyed and people are letting the bank own them). They’ve acquired a huge deficit, so it’s in their best interest to inspect these houses well and to construct roofs up to the new revised post-disaster code. It was super super cool to talk with him and see education in action outside of EWB, but still technically within EWB.
We talked until bedtime, and went to bed because I AM SO TIRED
2025-02-10