Mass Cement Production

We poured the cement for the last pole in the morning and then continued to pour cement through the yard. The Vietnamese students who are running the cement mixer decided they did not want to pour in sections anymore which meant no more forms. I finished forming the last row we had started and then we agreed to not frame the rest of the yard (about 50% remaining to complete). Once they started pouring a very large section, they realized they had poured too high. Now they understood the reason for the molds and the plumb lines. Sometimes you just have to let people do it their way and find the mistakes themselves. Once this happened, we began running plumb lines (but not frames) to make sure the cement was flat and/or slopped towards the drain we had designed in the back of the playground. A few hours later, when they were having problems with getting the cement the right thickness because it was not staying in place, they asked us to build to long forms for the remaining yard. The sections were still twice as large as the original ones we were building, but it was amusing to me to see the progression of thinking. We got the whole yard filled with cement today.

The concrete is a mixture of small rocks, sand, concrete mix and water. I shoveled rocks all day from the large pile into buckets which could be lifted to be dumped in to the cement mixer. It was not constant work, but it was labor intensive. Good thing I had all the practice from shoveling snow off the deck through the winter.

About 10 minutes after we finished pouring the last of the cement, the rain storm came through and it poured for about 10 minutes. Any chance we had of having smooth cement at this point was now ruined by the little dents made by the rain. Oh well, it was good enough for Vietnamese standards as the students didn’t seem to be bothered by the rain at all. We put up one shade sail before leaving the work site at 4pm. A nice luke warm shower was a nice reward for another day of hot, hard work. Dinner = same, same with fish heads and unidentifiable meat with noodles and rice. Once again, we headed to Yumi Café after dinner and this time Jack and I started off downstairs and then moved up top and met Dave Virgil and Dwight.