Part 3 Power! and Rain

Power! And Rain.

October 2014
It was time to get some power going around here.
RECO had been here and put in the meter, so next was digging a trench from the ridge where the meter is, down to the house site. Most people just put up a pole and wire but because of the ‘teefs’ around here we decided it would be best if we buried the wire.
I know it doesn’t look like much, but it was quite a lot of work to get to this stage. The wire was oversized and specialordered. in from the States and received after a long wait. Youhave the option here to do your own wiring, so Ed did with the help of Tie Tie.
Once the wire was buried there was left a terrible steep moonscape of clay on that hill that even after 10 years of terracing, mulching and planting any survivor plant that could grow, is still marginal at best. More on that later.
Inside the ‘house’ downstairs was installed an electrical panel. Now we had power! And music!

The retaining wall at the back has finally been completed. What a job!
Four walls are almost up and it feels like the job site is getting worse and worse. I am fearing the rain to come and turn this whole place into a horrible cesspool of muck.
The cement pillars are also up, they will support the house upstairs. This downstairs area will be a storage bodega/workshop and area for the freezers to support the catamaran business.

There is a guy who is a teacher by day and a welder by night; we have contacted him to make window security bars and a front gate for this building to protect our ‘stuff’

Next up on the project list is to make horizontal beams of cement – from the pillars to the back walls. Another really big complicated project that seemed to take forever.

First, they had to go out into the bush and find some relatively straight sticks to hold up the forms which will be made for the cement beams.
And then make all the rebar frames to go inside the forms.

The forms were made and put up using the sticks to support them. It was pretty interesting to watch it happen, never having seen anything like this before.

Little Flaca is here every single day to get fed, and for now is going home with the men. But she comes back every day, and she’s starting to look better and better!
Once all the forms are built and in place, the rebar was put inside, and the forms filled with cement.

The cement has all been mixed by hand with shovels, on the ground. No cement mixer. Then the cement is put in 5 gallon pails and thrown up to the guy on top, who empties the cement into the forms.
One bucket at a time. All day long.

Needless to say, I was feeling kind of useless, except for feeding the dog that is.

So I turned my attention to the long-avoided question of what in the hell am I going to do about this dead and dying landscape up the hill. It was just so depressing to look at and almost impossible to even walk around it and decide what to do, it was so steep and weed infested. TieTie had brought me a coconut tree sprout or two because he felt sorry for me, but it was just too hard to really do anything meaningful.

Because I don’t own a pair of sensible shoes I had to start making terraced pathways so I could get around on my flip flops. So we bought a couple of tools, some gloves and I got busy.

November is here and it’s starting to rain quite a lot. It was what we were afraid of…..we really need to get the roof on this building. Even though an entire house was eventually going to go on top, there was a temporary roof put on using the roofing metal everyone uses around here. Finally shade! And more important…..dry and better able to store our ‘stuff’.
While they were digging to put foundation in for the patio, the workers discovered a well! Fresh water! This was better than pirate treasure. They immediately built a well structure and lid for this amazing discovery. (Eventually, it turned out to be kind of brackish salty, but it is still much less salty than seawater. We use it now to flush toilets, which represents over half of our water usage)
Getting up out of the mud was not getting any easier, but they managed to clean up the floor in back of the bodega building with a nice flat cement pad, all reinforced with rebar. The water tanks will go here so it needed to be strong.
Little Flaca turned up every day, having obviously nowhere else to go. I worried about her on the weekends but every Monday she would show up with the workers again, happy and hungry.

We were trying to avoid cutting trees, but this oak just had to go. The place is a dirty muddy mess but we’re still going for it.

The cement block walls got ‘parged’ with cement mix in a little manual machine that the guy would hold up and turn a handle, and the cement spews out the end. Then they go over it with a trowel and sort of flatten it out a little, making a nice textured finish. They are cheap to buy and the worker guy wrecked the first one. So when we bought the second one, we told him that he could keep it once the job was done. He then made sure to clean that little machine carefully every day, and put it back in its box.
I was doing pretty good on my pathway up the hill, using the tree branch sticks they used to hold up the cement forms, as a way to stop the erosion and keep the path level.

I built myself a little nursery – the first of many iterations – as I was starting to get the dreaded plant disease. The need to propagate was becoming a problem so this helped a lot.
The goal was to have a nice clean cement patio all around the house.
Our cement contractor Randy was starting to get to us, regarding time being taken to do the job. It was becoming increasing obvious that we were getting taken for a ride. In addition, the crew thought it would be a good idea to unionize against us, and demand benefits, severance pay, etc etc. So off we went to the Labour Board. We are very experienced with this kind of stuff, having supervised 20 employees at Mango Creek, and the Calabash Resort, and our own crew on the catamaran. For to get benefits, an employee must work full time 44 hours a week, for a minimum of 250 days. We were nowhere near that and we knew it. So we brought the Labour lawyer and her assistant for a free East End tour so they could have a little meeting with our gang and explain the rules.

That done, Ed was so pissed off at everyone that he told them we were out of money, and so the job is getting shut down effective immediately so everyone can stay home from now on. A week later we re-hired most of them except Randy and the guy who was making most of the union noise.

Such a nice thing to have a roof over your head, electricity! Ed got to work immediately to put up some shelving to store the first of a ton of ‘stuff’. I don’t know where it all came from, but it took no time for that space to fill up.
A coat of nice white paint, some security bars and the place is starting to look just like home.
The cement patios all around help so much to get out of the mud. It seems like such a lot of work to get such a small space completed. I guess it probably was, seeing as how Randy took us to the cleaners on the labour side.
Never mind, what’s done is done and we have a nice new dry space to occupy!

It’s always so nice to have family come visit.
Brad flew down, as well as my sister Cathy and BIL Bruce.
We got away sailing a little, Flaca came along too, becoming a real boat dog. And we hung out at BJ’s where Bruce played with the Band.
During that visit we thought it would be a nice thing to do a traditional Island hog fry for the hard working crew as a thank you for all the dirty digging and hauling. A hog fry is really a special event and all the Islanders just love it. You get a butchered hunk of hog meat, and cut it up in random chunks preferably with a machete.
Other stuff in put in there, celery and onions I think and whatever else I don’t know. We hired Lindy and Alex – two of the workers that helped with the build – because we certainly didn’t knowhow to do it ourselves. They brought everything, we just made a countertop from sawhorses and planks. We bought the materials and the booze.
Then a wood fire is built and a huge cauldron of fat is brought to a boil. And all that stuff is thrown in to cook. Then it’s all brought out, sorta drained of grease and everyone chows down. It was pretty awful to us but everyone there loved it.
Everyone is right. Some of the people who came we knew – having worked on the job site. But I’m telling you people came from far and wide and most of them we didn’t even know who they were.

The cold beer disappeared almost immediately. Nobody does BYOB to these things, especially if a gringo Is hosting.
The party went on late into the night. Usually I think they go till dawn. But we were getting tired, and grumpy, and the ‘guests’ started getting into the warm beer that was stacked in a corner meant for the catamaran charters.

Ed had to finally tell them time to go home. And, the tradition here on the Island is that no food is left uneaten. Everyone takes leftovers – they ‘make a plate’ for home. We didn’t really understand this at the time, but if there are no take out plates, they take your house plates and cutlery. So we were surprised when the next day we had no dishes left. But that’s the way it is around here.
The cauldron itself was a nightmare of black crusty greasy soot that took two days to clean; Bruce was up to his knees in the swamp trying to get the worst of the black off.

Nope.
We will never do a hog fry again so might as well take that off the list.
It had come to our attention that there was a little kindergarten building on ‘the point’ (a little islet at the entrance to Calabash Bight) that was in need of a facelift. We went over to look at it and so heartbreaking to see the teacher having her class of about a dozen little kids out on the porch teaching them. The building was just that bad. Leaking roof, no fans, no wire, no water, no toilets; all had been stolen and vandalized by the rotten rat bastard thief who is a bane of the existence to all who live in Calabash. Said person must go un-named because Honduran law prohibits defamation of character. Even when this defamation is true.
At any rate, we did manage to scrape up enough donations from our catamaran customers to rebuild this tiny school. As a thank you, we received an invitation to come to the school’s graduation ceremony.
So cute these little kids all dressed in cap and gowns just like graduation from Harvard. It was all in Spanish and we didn’t understand a word of it. But we got a standing ovation; I suppose the Master of Ceremonies had mentioned the school’s refit.