Rubble Trouble

[caption id="attachment_1111" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="A typical rubble site"][/caption]

This week, I spent five out of six days working on clearing a gigantic rubble site. Basically, this involves clearing out all of the fallen building components from the house's slab or floor. Most homes in Leogane are constructed from concrete and cinder blocks, reinforced by rebar (metal bars roughly half an inch in diameter).

The goal here is simple: clear out an area on the property that is suitable for construction of a new abode.  Some families rebuild their own homes, and others receive temporary/transitional shelters donated & built by foreign aid groups & NGOs.  A major issue that Haiti faces is building code, in that there is no standard building code here -- families will typically build according to the resources available, not to any specific safety standard.  Consequently, this can result in a structure that could collapse in another disaster -- hurricane, tropical storm, earthquake -- and kill or injure its inhabitants.  As with many governments of developing nations, the Haitian government is notoriously corrupt - I'm no expert, but it seems to me that there must be a major paradigm shift in the way things are run here in order for this country to rebuild and progress forward.

Back to rubble.  A typical day on a rubble site involves the following tasks:

Shoveling - self-explanatory. Take shovel, move rubble to wheelbarrow.

Wheelbarrowing - also self-explanatory. Take wheelbarrow, move rubble to rubble pile. Running is optional. This task can be quite grueling, since the loads are more than 100 pounds each, and the rubble depositories are sometimes a couple hundred feet away.

Cutting & removing rebar - one of my favorite jobs. Rebar is tied with thin pieces of metal wire and I like to pretend that I'm on the bomb squad. Don't cut the gray wire! Rebar is kind of scary though, since it's very sharp & often rusty. Some of the pieces are 10 to 15 feet long & tied to several other pieces to form a sort of cage for support beams and filled with reinforced concrete, which leads us to ...

Sledgehammering - everyone loves sledging! There is something very satisfying about taking a large hammer and smashing the hell out of something. The concrete rebar columns often require lots of smashing, as do the partially intact walls & floors.

Picking - use a pickaxe to rake down uncleared rubble to where it is shovel-able.

So there you have it. Pretty simple work but very grueling since you're outside, often in the sun, for about seven hours a day: 7:30-11:30 AM, then 1:30-4:30 PM.

No work tomorrow! Planning to sleep in (8AM is about when the sun becomes too unbearable to sleep) & later go to hang out with a Haitian friend at his house & eat coconuts.