week one

The first week of work for me consisted mainly of working on the "compacto" as we affectionately called it. The locals simply called it "la machina" (the machine). It is an easy process with routine tasks, so we would rotate positions. Essentially, you shovel in "la tierra" (earth, dirt) optimally with mainly sands and 20%ish clay mixture. The pounder, manually compacts the steel form with a wood bat as the form is being filled. The pulley arm swings over to the opposite side to compress the block as that person yanks, swings, bounces, and wills the block to compress sufficiently. (The picture shows a multi-person effort to compress a singular block; that was a good block.) We were, however, told later that the block should not be that difficult - that we were packing them too much creating a very dense block using a very high clay content of soil. Oh well.

Some other people made "sokete" - mud to make the larger adobe for the interior and mortar for laying the adobes. Doesn't that just look fun? I seem to remember an "I Love Lucy" episode of grape squashing, wine-making. Hmm. Of course one person had to be the first to fall in - later, people were thrown in, I mean, somehow they found their way into a big pile of mud. Good days.