Rebar

Thursday's Pictures

I hate rebar. Well, maybe hate is a strong word (I don’t let my boys use that word lightly…). Nope, after reconsidering, I hate rebar. This morning at the new school worksite, we continued laying out #1 rebar in a grid 15x15 centimeters (6”x6”) square. I roughly counted the play area court, and found it to be 95 rebar wide by 180 rebar long. That’s over 17,000 intersections of rebar. Our job was to lay out all the rebar into the grid, then connect every other intersection with a 1.25mm thick piece of wire. Thankfully, Pastor Jim had brought a tool with him that takes the ends of the wires and spins them around each other. One of the Brazilians on the job site saw the tool, and after some explaining from Pastor Jim, promptly made about five or six of the tools out of rebar (the only thing about rebar that I liked). This tool, when used properly (which was about 22% of the time for me) made twisting the wires together much easier than using pliers. And when you have 3.4 million intersections to wire together, you need all the help you can get! OK – maybe the actual number was closer to 8,500, but it seemed like 3.4 million. Spending an entire day bent over working at ground level can make things seem a bit out of perspective.

After noon, we realized that we only had about 1/3 of the court done, and less than 2/3 of our day left. For some reason, laying the rebar down and wiring it at every other intersection with about 20 people simultaneously was not as easy as it sounds. The rebar was not straight, 15 centimeters could be 10 or 12 or 16 or 20 centimeters, sometimes there was too much rebar, not enough rebar, and, oh – we didn’t speak the same language as the guy spinning wire next to us. So, I’m not sure why we had such a hard time!  So the decision was then made to start attaching every third intersection. But even then, if you didn’t keep track of what was wrapped every third row above you for two rows, you could easily miss where to start, and then vertical rows could be unattached for many, many rows. If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it. I was there and it still didn’t make sense.

I did see something for the first time today – a blueprint! It was very unusual to see someone actually referring to one. I thought they must have had it completely memorized or something! :)

Other projects still happened as well as rebar – painting, pulling nails, moving roof support forms, making 3.4 million wire forms for the wire-attaching crew to wire the rebar together with, etc.

As quitting time started getting closer, more and more people were pulled of what jobs they were working on and started wiring rebar. The order came down to now wire every 5 intersections. Concrete had been ordered, and will arrive tomorrow at 7:30AM. The rebar must be completely wired before the concrete arrives! Finally quitting time with dusk came around 5:00PM, and I saw something else for the first time – light bulbs on the work site. Before we knew it, the lights were on and illuminating the would-be gym floor, and we continued to wire rebar. And continued, and continued… I kept waiting on someone to say that we only needed to wire every 18th intersection! But, alas, it never came. Finally, around 7:30PM, we were done (not the rebar, but us. The rebar was close). After a late dinner (not uncommon around here), some of the guys headed to a soccer field to play “futbol” (soccer), and others (like me!) decided that they didn’t have enough energy to run around a field chasing a ball.

I hate rebar!

Mark