Rocks and bricks and bits and stones

So its back to the grind, back to real life. We have gotten a few piles of trash rocks, broken bricks and broken cobblestones, some of it was the left overs from things we have asked for, some of it was people dumping what maybe they thought would be useful material for us. In spanish, we call this mixed material 'escombros'.

I had left 100 bags (estopas) and asked the neighbors to fill some up, as I would bring them up with the car. Instead, and in my absence, they seemed to have started some political campaign to get the town mayor to come and take the material away.

Total facepalm for me, as some of the material, like the broken cobblestones, are left over scrap of what the mayor sent us, and all this material is in some way useful for our road efforts, if properly managed. So I got to work, and hired these two tigers to help me bag it up.

I gave them the 100 sacks, and made a deal to clean it all up, out to the road. They got to work bagging right away, starting with the broken cobbles.

The idea is to clean up the area and ask for more high quality material, something I fear will never happen again if we pressure the mayor into cleaning up our mess.

They quickly dispatched with the first 100 sacks, and I brought them 100 more while I went into town to negotiate some more.

My wife told me that they would have to put all the bags into the corner to keep the area clean, there are so many sacks who knows when I will get around to bringing them all up the road. The guys told me they would, for a bit more money, make sure to organize all the sacks up on the ledge at the end.

So I went into town, and started looking around. After a while I got a hot tip for cheap sacks at a local coffee silo. These people take wet, washed coffee and use heat to fast dry it. They get wet sacks full of coffee and pack the dry stuff into these yute bags, which is a natural fiber material.

Thus they have a lot of sacks that they sell pretty cheap to the community.

Their sacks are dirty, and many of them still wet, smelling like fermenting coffee. Some entrepreneurs buy them and clean them, selling clean dry sacks for as much as 25 cents! I negotiated these dirty, wet sacks for just 8 cents a piece, after all I'm just filling them with broken bits of brick for the road.

They accepted my deal, and gave me a discount as I pleaded that this was for a community effort to fix our road, not for some profit making enterprise. Plus I was buying a nice bulk load, so they took me up into the humid and smoky upper regions of the coffee silo to count bags.

So I spent 50 more dollars on sacks, I drove them up and let the fellows know that it was time to get back to work. They were finishing lunch and rushed back to start scooping. This isn't hourly labor, they are on a contract so it is in their interest to work hard and get done quick.

So far I have been impressed with these young tigers, they seem interested in more work after this is done, they work odd jobs around town and on different farms, they are young but seem pleasant to talk to and sufficiently respectful and concious to have a conversation with.

Here is my wife explaining the names of the birds we saw while standing around talking about broken bits of bricks, and their association with different native trees that are also visible in the area.

In the meantime, we have to see what the local community will decide - several parts of the road have become damaged and impassable after some groups forgot some basic bits of engineering while building their sections. Its probably worth writing another post or two about road building.

I am not an engineer but after years and years of working on the road - and plenty of reading and talking to people who are engineers - I have learned a lot and have developed a generally holistic strategy for roadbuilding. Let's just say that the parts I have built are not the ones that got damaged in the recent storms!

I am trying to save up to buy one of my neighbor's farms, it just happens to be the neighbor that I have the most disagreements about regarding roadbuilding, and many other topics. Part of me thinks, as the rainy season is almost upon us, that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if the road stayed damaged throughout the season, just long enough for me to make an offer on their farm.

With a working road - farms in these areas are surely worth a lot more money per hectare!

We will see what the community decides, but let's just say that in this moment I am not really disposed to shell out a lot of money out of my pocket to fix their mistakes. Even if I will to bag up all of this good material and save face politically, I might just walk up to the farm throughout this rainy season, and see what happens on the community front.

Freedom and Friendship