Day Eleven: In the Trenches

More rain, more buckets.  The new angle on things today was the beginning of digging on a huge trench that will serve as the prime support for the concrete tank at the core of our project.  As of today, we all realize that we don’t really know what we are building, as we can’t quite picture it even though we have seen drawings, talked about it for days on end now, and imagined what it should look like. 

No matter what this thing is supposed to be, our job for today was to dig a three-foot deep trench inside which we will build plywood forms that will provide the shape for the concrete supports of the tank.  To dig a trench that deep that is 22 feet long means that a whole lot of dirt needs to be diverted somewhere else.  Thousands of pounds of dirt.  And lots of water.  And a few rocks.  Some of them really really big.  When those things land together in a full bucket, they weigh about 50 pounds.  We needed to move bucket after bucket after bucket.

So we got back into bucket brigade mode and created a whole new set of roles, including dumpers (who may or may not use the “hip ninja” move from yesterday), catchers (who help the empty buckets travel back down the line by leapfrogging over most of the people who are passing full buckets), and poppers (who knock the clinging clay and mud out of the bottom of an already-dumped bucket).  We’ve been playing all of these roles for a week or so now, but we have finally figured out a shorthand way to announce what is going on. 

The trench situation turned quite complicated right away, as we were digging right in front of a wall with multiple springs running out of it.  Of course, that water immediately started pooling into our trench, which meant that we had to bail water at the same time that we were digging, just to see what we were doing.  Our strategy, then, was to dig another set of lesser trenches all around our support trench so that we could divert the water around the trench (like a little moat).  Different ones of us would go around and watch for where water was getting in and move dirt and rocks to block the flow.  We couldn’t cut it off entirely, but we managed to redirect it pretty substantially. 

As it turns out, even with really strong workers and lots of them, digging a 22-foot trench takes a very long time.  We got to the end of the workday and had just completed the entire trench, meaning that we didn’t have enough daylight left to build the plywood box that would bolster it.  Thus, when we return tomorrow we expect to encounter a partially collapsed trench that is overflowing with water but at least we will have an easier time re-establishing it now that we have gotten it to the right dimensions once. 

At the very end of the time at the site, a delivery truck arrived with our last shipment of sand.  Because of all of the rain today, the driver could not get all the way down to the breadfruit tree, so he had to leave the load partway up the hill instead.   That decision means that we will have to wheelbarrow it much farther to get it to our pulleys tomorrow, but there was no choice so that is what we will have to do.  We look forward to getting back to our fabulous pulleys, so getting to use them again will help ease the pain of the strenuous overland haul. 

The other silver lining of the arrival of a new load of materials was that we got to hitch a ride in the delivery truck to get ourselves and our equipment (including wheelbarrows) up the steep hill.  It is always a little difficult to load everything back out of the valley where the springs are (“where the two trees stand alone”), especially after a day of trench-digging and bucket-dumping.  We even let Matt H. get in the truck from the beginning this time, instead of making him run behind it.  The truck is by no means glorious, but the ride certainly was. 

We ventured back home and had an excellent dinner of chicken with mangoes and raisins, some tater tot like things made from a local root vegetable called “daishen,” beans, and fancy macaroni and cheese.  We eat very well here, including last night’s meal that had two especially fabulous components: cornbread and rice pie.  We’ve eaten a lot of fish and chicken, some beef, some pork, and lots of fruit.   The main vegetables we eat are tomatoes and cucumbers, as well as roots like manioc and daishen.  We often have freshly-squeezed juices and incredible local fruits.  We even have fresh-ground cocoa from a tree in the yard. 

We have a birthday coming up tomorrow, which means we will have a short work day so we can go to dinner and have a celebration.  We’ll wait until then to tell you whose age is increasing . . .

Day Ten: Hip Ninja

We went back and filled in lots of missing pieces on the blog, so please click back to catch up on videos and pictures (though not all of the captions have been posted yet).  Also, thanks for the comments!  We are much happier now . .  .

Rain, rain, rain, and more rain POURED down just before most of us woke up this morning and it kept falling in sheets all the way until the time that we just needed to get to work.  So we bundled up in our rain gear and went to work anyway. We hoofed it down the hill with water just pouring down the streets and pouring down from the sky.  By the time we settled into the job, though, the rain abated and we got to get into a rhythm that lasted until the end of the day (for better or worse).

Charles let us know that we had to scrape even more dirt out of the space where the water tank will soon sit, so we were back on bucket brigades for (literally) tons of redirected soil and rocks.  Some of us stood in the exact same place all day long, just turning one way and then another to pass a muddy bucket down the line.  We started coming up with ways to break the monotony, including having each person say something as the bucket passed by, like a color, an animal, a state capital, a world leader, a funny noise, a line NOT to say on a first date, or whatever.  At least once, we just said the name of the next person in the line, but it had to be in a funny voice.

People learned some fancy techniques today, including Trevor's incredible reverse push press (no-peeky) as he lifted the bucket backward over his head uphill to Iris, Iris's squat pump to retrieve it from Trevor, and the inspiration for our title today: Goose's "hip ninja."  On this last one, Goose (Jon) would be the dumper at the end of the line, which meant he had to stand on a hill and clear it to get the mud out onto the pile we were creating.  He had some hip flex that he did that made the mud fly out of the bucket in just the direction that he intended without needing to lean out over the pit. 

We broke for lunch when Matt H. and Morgan delivered our homemade fish stew (made mostly by Matt, with assists from Trevor, Dani, Jared, Shawny, Luke, Morgan and Scott), which made great use of our fresh catch (well, some fisherman’s fresh catch, anyway) from yesterday.  Several of us (but mostly Matt) stayed up late into the night trying to figure out exactly how to scale and fillet all of the different fish we acquired, even though few of us really felt like we knew what we were doing.  Somehow, despite our collective ignorance, the stew was really good.  We had taken some backup foods just in case it was awful, but there was no need to resort to crackers or Clif bars today. 

After lunch the buckets started moving again.  No matter what anyone’s job was, we all were deeply immersed in the world of repetitive motion, which might leave us very sore in the morning. Despite our relative pain, we stayed all the way to the edge of darkness to get the job finished today, as we hope to start pouring the foundation of the tanks in the next day or two. 

Once we got home and cleaned up, we immediately found our state of cleanliness interrupted by the after-dark arrival of a truckload of cement bags.  75 bags weighing somewhere between 85 and 95 pounds arrived, so we all jumped up on the truck, rode it to a house close to the worksite, and unloaded it with headlamps in the dark.  Somehow, it was really exhilarating. 

We came back, ate dinner, then had a little meeting where we decided to reduce our overall computer usage due to overexertion of our bandwidth and our collective belief that we are hurting our unity here if we are too tied to places far away.  We aren’t cutting ourselves off completely, but we are reducing overall usage so that we are more in the moment here.  We hope that we will post the blog in a more reliable (and timely) fashion if we do this and we also hope that we will find ourselves laughing even more, either in our teams or in other random clusters. 

 Hilary playing guard dog

 Justinian taking the cutlass to the hill

 Leaving a mark 

 Scott trying to keep it clean 

 The Mt. Man

Yeah, we walk this hill at least once a day

While excavating dirt from around the spring today, we unearthed this crab, the largest of the trip so far. 

The group and some locals remove dirt from around the spring, then move the dirt away via a bucket line. 

The bucket line and a pile of debris that was moved in previous days. 

The muddy bucket line; take note of Iris' shirt. 

Day Nine: Water, Water, and More Water

Perhaps you can tell that we've been having internet problems.  We post when we can get a few minutes of connection, then wait and wait until it happens again.  Please keep checking.  And maybe send us a comment or two to motivate us to get things to work!

Anyway, today we took the day off to do some sightseeing in Dominica.  We acted like regular old tourists for the most part, riding around in two vans to some of the hot tourist sites.  Our first stop was a pool that looked like a lovely river swimming hole, but we knew that a more famous tourist spot was close by so we opted to check it out instead.

We therefore started our water day at the Emerald Pool, which is a fabulous small waterfall in a wooded cove that is really sweet for swimming.  The water really does seem to be a deep emerald green color, but not because it is full of algae or other slime.  It's easy to reach, refreshing as a swimming spot, and just an all around good time.  We lounged a bit and frolicked a bit, some swam while others took in the sights, and then we headed toward our next site all the way on the other side of Roseau, where we arrived by boat.

We stopped in Roseau to get Dominican currency (EC dollars, which have an exchange rate of 2.6 or so with one U.S. dollar) and were surprised to learn that there was actually a grocery store open on Sunday afternoon.  We all swarmed in and got cold Cokes for the first time in Dominica.  We also picked up a bunch of lunch meat, cheese, and apples for today's lunch, along with lots of canned meat for future lunches at our worksite.

We then moved on to our big adventure of the day, which was a hike into Trafalgar Falls, another national park area.  The trails to the vista spot were easy to walk, but to get right up to the falls takes some serious bouldering on slippery rocks.  When you get really close to the falls, the offspray is so thick that you can barely open your eyes as you continue forward.

Trafalgar actually is comprised of two falls, one of which is long and narrow and runs HOT.   It collects in little mineral pools at the bottom that would kick the pants of Napa Valley spas.  The other runs colder (but not freezing) and is the safest one to reach.  Thus, we went along the edge of the warm one to get to the cold one and we frolicked quite a bit more before hiking back to the top.

All along the roads we saw lots of water because we skimmed the coast of the Atlantic Ocean then moved around to the coast of the Caribbean Sea.  We also crossed river after river after river and we saw lots of springs that were being tapped in a variety of ways, the most common apparently being bamboo chunks that were either "half pipes" or full stalks that were hollowed out.  We therefore had lots of conversations about water with our drivers and learned some interesting things that relate to our own current project.

As we mentioned in an earlier post (or two), we have been struggling with a bit of guilt about our feeling that we are walking into an unspoiled natural paradise, scraping and paving part of it, then walking away leaving it looking worse than when we started.  We just learned, however, that this plan has been in the works for more than ten years and it was actually a campaign promise of the election two administrations ago that this project would be completed in the Carib Territory.

Based on this knowledge, we now have a renewed sense of pride in what we are doing.  We always thought it was the thing to do because it was the thing we were asked to do, but now we see it as an unfulfilled wish that we can finally help to become a reality.  We are very happy about that shift in our perspective.

We learned a lot in the car(s) today as we talked about history, music, and literature in the Carib Territory and in Dominica at large.  We hope that we are getting a better handle and where we are and what we are doing.  At the end of our excursion today, we ran into a spear fisherman who was walking with his fresh catch.  He sold us everything he had (some of which we have never seen before, some of which looked familiar, and some of which were lobsters and an octopus).  We hauled them home and got advice from our driver about how to use fresh coconut water (the liquid inside the coconut) and coconut meat to make a traditional fish stew.  If all goes well, we will have it for lunch tomorrow.

We also got invitations to go fishing for crayfish and to go to the meadows where a certain kind of grass grows that figures into traditional basket-weaving.  We really hope that we can fit in everything that we are being offered.  We are getting very familiar with what it means to be a Dominican and what it means to be a Carib.  We know that we will never really know either of those things, but we are happy to be getting insights that we never would have gotten from our rooms in Moraga.  We miss home, but we are happy about what is happening for us (and for our hosts) here.   We would still love to hear from you, though, so comment on this blog or write individual emails to the people you know on this trip.  They are all working very hard and could use some encouragement.  Thanks for following!