Mazunte Build - Machines Taking Over Work: The Day Everything Changed

about 4 years ago

For sure, these days it’s hard to find a day that doesn’t turn your whole world upside down. With a full moon (three days ago), the New Year in the Mexica calender (yesterday), Friday the 13th (today), you don’t even need to get into all the craziness the media is full of… so I’m not even going to get into all that! Instead, I’d like to address the change that was brought to our Earthship construction project, which was just about to reach desperate levels. This change came in form of dirt. And lots of it! As a result I’m in a mood of exuberant optimism, having restored my faith in that in April the roof beams will be up, and we’ll be on the way to more wonderful building workshops next year. But let me start a the beginning.

All Hands On Deck! - What Hands?

Okay, so the first major challenge we had to face was lack of hands. As wonderfully as the project had started, with lots of volunteers pouring in through the websites we used, as well as those we met from simply being on the hippie-surfer-traveler trail in Mazunte, once we were confronted with the administrative issues regarding our building permit, they suddenly stopped coming. This was the case even once we had all our papers signed, green lights flashing, and all. So for about two weeks just the four of us, not counting our first volunteer, who had to go back in Mexico City for a week to take care of some things. But when it comes to pounding tires, and especially moving dirt, a lack of hands can make a huge difference.

Looking for Chalanes

So clearly, if nobody wants to work for free, we’ll have to find people who are willing to do paid work. These type of general laborers are called chalanes in Mexico, and we started looking for them right away. Well, it was more difficult than you’d assume. People in Mazunte generally don’t care for doing manual labor, especially if it’s physically taxing like ours. However, there are many folks coming in from villages in the 100 km radius, who tend to be amazing hard workers… if you can find them, that is. What tends to happen, more often than not, is that someone will say they are going to come the next day to introduce themselves and look at the work, and in the end never show up. After a couple of days the week is over, and once again we realize how much further back we are. Each time it’s a little bit more disconcerting.

In the end we managed to get two teenagers to come to help out for a week, who had been employed by Julia in her other construction project in La Boquilla, I had mentioned in my post about earthbag construction. It was nice to receive these hard-working youngsters, and they extended our repertoire of languages spoken on our property from Spanish, English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, and Russian by the native tongue of Zapotec. (We're so awesome!) More importantly, with their help we managed to make some amazing advances, and interestingly, that’s when volunteers started showing up again. So we got busy at keeping all hands busy again! That is, until work turned into busy work, which is not so nice.

Got Dirt? Need More Dirt!

If you’ve ever built an Earthsip, you may know that the key to a continuous progress is not only a nice collection of tires, and lots of strong hands swinging sledgehammers, but a seemingly endless supply of dirt. You need it not only to fill the tires, but for the thick berm you build up behind the tire wall. Also, it’s not nice if you have to cart (let alone bucket!) the dirt from far away corners. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we were forced to do, once we had used up the dirt mounds piled up around our construction site.

It’s not like there was not any more dirt to be gotten. On the contrary: the owner of the property right across the street offered to sell us some of his dirt, literally dirt cheap, and as local as you could get. All we needed to do was to have it excavated and brought it over to our site. And this operation required two machines: a back-hoe and a dump truck. Not exactly rare commodities, but in the end it was super hard to come by, since everything here operates in a Mexican (or rather Mazuntean) fashion:

Normally you call the place, ask about prices and times of availability, and make an appointment for them to come to do the work. So far so good, but in practice the final result is usually negative. Just like the chalanes, in the end they just never show up! If you’re lucky you may get a lame ass excuse, though complete lack of communication is way more common. So after a couple of days of empty promises the week is over and you realize that it’s practically impossible to build another course of tires without any more dirt, notwithstanding all the eager hands. Period. That was the realization we reached yesterday. But today finally fortune smiled on us.

Two Machines Making all the Difference

When two different places gave us their most sincere confirmation that they’d be here at 9:00 a.m. the next morning, we had serious doubts about it. Even if the excavator came, without the back hoe it would be useless, and vice versa. So imagine our excited surprise when both machines showed up, right around the same time. Of course we got them working right away, and all of us joined in moving the dirt around, which they kept piling up all around our build. It was super exciting to watch the material accumulate, first simply as the body of the berm, and then on top of that in piles we could use to fill the next courses of tires with. By now we have eleven courses up, and with only two more to go, it’s pretty much a given that we’ll be moving on the bond-beam by next week. Woo-Hoo!