Hello,

.

All the holes we dig here take a lot of work to fill back in. Usually with lots of rocks and sledgehammering and so on. But this one twisted us around in new ways. A different kind of baptism.

This excavation for a quarried stone stand for two 1500 liter water tanks near the kitchen seemed harmless enough. 12' by 9' by 5' and down to the murram. But it has been raining here now almost everyday and water has been trickling in from several small underground rivulets

which find their way through tiny self-made gaps in the joint mortar.

They're like post-op bleeders, small but important. Eric, our water guy, thinks that in the rainy season the underground water flow, following the contour of the land, comes under the patio of the kitchen/administration building and carries on from there. We may, if the dowsing is conclusive, dig a shallow well in this aquatic path to collect the water for our use and retard its potentially harmful downward travels.

In any case we couldn't back fill this site in the normal crushed hardcore and murram fashion, since the water would too easily find its way through. So we needed to fill it entirely with very compacted murram and persuade it to an easier path. But because of the heavy rains and in spite of repeated pumping efforts, we couldn't get it dry enough.

What we needed was a temporary truce. Stop the flow long enough to get the mud out and back fill with 8"layers of murram, compacted with our new vibrating compactor.

If I weren't such a knucklehead, I would have bought one two years ago, instead of trying to find one for hire when we needed it.

Other work continued on as usual. Joyce still came to cook lunch for us.

The houses were getting their security windows.

And the T&G siding and flooring were sliding into place.

.

The combination water tank stand and clothes washing sink was growing,

and getting smooth, luscious curves.

The facia boards came early so we could get them up and put in the guttering asap.

We had a one night break in the rain, so today was our chance. We bailed the last bits of water from the hole we had dug in the low point and made concrete patches backed by plastic barriers over the leakers.

And then made bigger and bigger efforts to staunch the flow...just temporarily...so we could get the murram in and compacted,

until we had lined the entire length with overlapping heavy polythene sheeting. As I learned from my friend, Chris, you can lead a horse to water, but the water is still going to do whatever it pleases. We worked for a couple of hours trying to tip the balance and wound just getting tipsy.The murram we were putting down was too wet and the compactor was bogging down after a single pass, and we had to stop and hack and scrape the bottom clean. We probably needed about 500 passes to get the job done.

We brushed used motor oil on the compacting blade after every cleaning which helped a little.

And we hacked and scraped some more.

.

Then we got the bright idea to put some of the polythene sheeting on top of the murram and run the compactor over it. That was a big improvement, though a little tricky. And eventually we were able to raise the level of the compacted murram enough to gain some breathing room. While we were compacting the guys were filling the Bedford with the next load of murram, and we finally got down to some dried stuff and could skip the sheeting.

.

It started to rain about 4pm. Our guttering is up on the kitchen building, but an order of joints and connectors that was fabricated incorrectly has prevented us from being able to tie it in with the underground piping system to the storage tanks. That should be remedied next week.

I got wet a little in it,

and collected, in about ten steps, some of the fly paper soil on my shoes.

The collection barrel under the gutter's flow floated shoes better suited for today's work.

But we did manage to find some drier murram in our big pile, and get almost all the hole filled and compacted, and safe for now from subterranean subterfuge. It was a long, tiring, muddy, and, I guess you could say, a Holy Thursday.

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What I wanted when I got home was a Demerol drip and a squad of skilled, empathic Swedish masseuses. What I got was a shower with hot water, dinner, a smile from Emily Moses, and a long talk with my nearest distant friend. On that night when bread and trust were broken, when friends slept and great heart faltered, I was safe and fed and loved and sure of tomorrow,  that we could call it Good.

.

Some payment has been made. And soon, Easter.

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So long for now.

.

David

Posted on April 2nd, 2010 by david
Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

I’m pretty sure this is the last time I’ll talk to you this way before I fly out on the 18th. So this is my best hurried attempt to lay out the last couple of weeks, at least with regard to the construction. Lots else has happened, Brit has left, the NGO application is slogging its way through some deep water, the rains haven’t come, Wilson is visiting, a million other things, and tempus, as usual, fugit.

.

The last time you saw the children’s house they were short. Now they’re taller. Even with the shortage of timber from Uganda, they are growing.

It's been a while since you've seen what's going on with the kids houses.

These wall panels are fabricated at the workshop and then brought here.

And raised into place.

Like this very first one.

Then we reenact the barn-raising scene from "Witness."

Minus the fried chicken and the cool Amish hats.

 

 

All the seasoned timber is nailed together straight as an arrow.

 

And clamped to make sure all the angles are right.

 

 

I stopped by the workshop the other day and saw some of our panels

and trusses being finished.

The next day they were here.

Now all the framing is done

and the trusses will go up on Monday.

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We’ve spent a good deal of the fortnight working on a home for the rainwater storage tanks.

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Once the seemingly endless job of excavating the area for the water storage tanks was done, we needed to pour the six concrete foundations.

We needed forms for them. Each foundation is 12' 4" in diameter. So Opyio took some of our recycled construction lumber and made cuts for and aft

so the straight boards could bend

and hold hands and make a circle.

Meanwhile, we were setting the posts

in two feet of concrete that with some chain link and barbed wire and heavy poly sheeting will form the retaining wall.

And dumping a half dozen Bedford loads of our murram

to level the curved, sloping cut.

 

We wet it and packed it.

 

'Til it looked like this.

We set Opyio's round form, braced it with quarried stones, lined the bottom with 1000ml poly sheeting, laid in the steel reinforcing, all under Flat Stanley's supervision.

We fired up Al's Birthday mixer and dumped bucket after bucket off the small cliff into rotating wheelbarrows

and dumped it into the unbroken circle.

Distributed it throughout.

Dumped some more.

Hired some questionable help.

Fashioned it by hand

and foot

into this.

The next couple of days looked a lot the same,

but we had six of them soon enough.

.

The rest of the time we’ve been working to connect the tanks to the roofs.

.

We needed to dig again. Sometimes it seems we are gophers. What we do is move dirt. Here we're digging the trenches that will house the 4 and 5 inch pipes that will carry the rain water from the roofs to the storage tanks.

The one to the kitchen/administration building needed to be long and straight.

And the others branched off from it

at exactly forty five degrees to the children's houses

to match all of the connectors which will tie them together.

They are all one foot wide and two feet deep.

If you fell in slow motion into one

it would look

like this.

 

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Merry Christmas from all your friends here to you and your families. If you all came here, we’d go to the coast, Mombasa, like lots of folks here do, and swim in the Indian Ocean and buy each other sunscreen with bows attached.

.

David

Posted on December 12th, 2009 by david
Filed under: Recent News | 8 Comments »