“Birthday” Weekend and Another Floor!

Posted on September 10, 2019 by Lark

It’s been a fun couple of weeks! Ever since I got back from the States, I’ve been feeling so much more at ease and like I have some sort of control over what happens each day. I’m working on not needing to be totally in control in order to feel okay, but it is nice to at least feel like I have my feet on the ground instead of being sent this way and that by whatever wind happens to blow at the moment. I’ve pieced together a routine for the mornings and evenings during the week, and since our schedule is much more regular when teams aren’t here, I’ve actually been able to stick to it.

We’ve also been trying to be more productive with our weekends, getting out and doing things instead of rotting away in our apartment, and that’s been helping too. When all you do is work and rot, life passes by incredibly quickly. And it gets old and boring. I’m neither old nor boring, so why should I let my life be?

Mountains and moon — Super clear night! Check out those mountains in the background and the moon up above!

Anyway, I’m letting myself get sidetracked before I even begin! Work has been 1 part fun and 1 part tedious. The fun part is the construction! Two weeks ago, they finished laying out the bricks and the conduit (for the electrical wiring) and everything for the first ceiling on Module 2. I had to check the box locations and how they ran the tubes to make sure it all matched up with my plans, and that Saturday, they poured the concrete! This isn’t the first pour they’ve done, of course, but I had the best view of this one. I went up on the third floor of Module 1 and watched from above. The pump truck came in and set up, then the concrete trucks came, and I got to see the whole pouring procedure from start to finish. It was awesome! And since I was technically on the site, I had to wear a hard hat the whole time which made me feel like a big deal even though I was literally doing nothing but taking pictures and trying to stay out of the way.

Here are some pictures so that you can experience the fun! Also, the thought has just crossed my mind that you might not find this nearly as interesting or exciting as I do, but try to imagine that you helped to design a building, have a strong case of imposter syndrome (aka I don’t feel like I’m completely qualified for the role that I’m playing) (though don’t let that worry you because I truly am confident in my design), and despite that, people are listening to you and actually doing what your drawings say… and the building is going up before your eyes. Welcome to my life and the reasons behind my super excitement!

More bricks for the ceiling — Adding the bricks in for the future floor/ceiling. This is Module 2 (I’m standing on Module 1, on the third floor, to take this picture). The area on the left side is going to be the corridor. The completed two sections of brick are a classroom.

Putting in PVC pipe for the future wiring — Working on adding in the conduit for the 1st floor lighting/fire alarm/ceiling fans and 2nd floor outlets

Lots of PVC pipes — So much conduit! This is where everything needs to go to make it back to the panel, so we have a lot of tubes coming together here.

Two of the construction guys — I was creeping around taking pictures, and the guy on the right yelled for me to take a picture of them 🙂

PVC pipes for formwork clamps — Looking down into the biggest beam in our building. See those PVC pipes inside? The wood is clamped together with the help of steel bars running through those pipes, making sure that it won’t move during the pour and the beam will come out exactly as it should. Thanks to the pipes, the clamps can be removed after the concrete is in place.

Module 2 completely ready for the concrete pour — Okay, time to pour!

Pump truck unfurling its arm — This was so much fun to watch. This is the pump truck for the concrete. It has this super long arm so that it can reach every point on the floor.

Pump truck with its crazy arm — Look at it stretching across the building!

The concrete pour — This is how the pouring process goes… The guy at the bottom in the white is controlling the pump truck’s arm. The guy in the green shirt is guiding the tube to make sure the concrete goes where he wants it. Then, the two guys behind him come through with vibrators to help the concrete settle and make sure there aren’t any air pockets. The guy in the orange uses a rake to even out the surface. Finally, the guy in the back in the grey comes through with a piece of wood and smooths it out. Whew!

Nearly halfway finished — Making some good progress

Working in the final section — Just a little more!

The finished pour — Finished! (well, except for the last corner but essentially finished)

Junction boxes and conduit cut into a brick stairwell wall — Future light locations in the stairwell! This is going to be a regular light and an emergency light

Concrete-mixing station — Column-pouring day! Here’s the concrete mixing station. You can see the piles of sand and gravel next to the mixer, plus the concrete and water are nearby. Can you see the shadow Lara nearby?

Guy on a ladder with a bucket of concrete — After the concrete was ready, they put it into 5-gallon buckets for this guy to carry up the world’s most rickety ladder. He handed it to the next guy who walked it over to the guy on the “scaffolding” who dumped it into the column

Using the vibrator to get any air pockets out of the column

Parapet wall on the 3rd floor — The 3rd floor in Module 1 is coming together too! It’s going to have a half-wall, so that’s what you see the beginnings of here.

Parapet wall with columns — Parapet making good progress!

The building from behind — So tall! And there’s not even a roof on it yet!

Two weekends ago was a big deal, not only because the concrete pour was on Saturday morning (working on a weekend is not the best, but that was cool enough that I could get over it), but also because Julie and I declared it Birthday Weekend and created a schedule of events for Friday – Sunday. For those of you who know when my birthday is, this may seem strange… because it’s in December. Same with Julie’s. BUT, ever since we realized that no one is going to be around during our actual birthdays, we’d been talking about having a joint half-birthday party. Well, that would have been in June, and June was a busy month. And so was July. But now, things have settled down a bit, and what better way to celebrate than with a 2/3 birthday party! (Interestingly enough, not my first 2/3 birthday party. I used to throw those every year in high school… but that’s a story for another time.)

Neighborhood mountains — We had a nice, clear day for once. Look at how pretty the mountains look!

We didn’t go TOO crazy with the event planning because no one is going to sign up for an all-consuming not-actually-your-birthday weekend. So, this is what we ended up with for the schedule of events:

Friday night – pancake dinner followed by a bonfire dance party (including s’mores because why else even bother with a fire? Certainly not because we just like smelling like smoke.)

Bonfire and s'mores! — Post pancakes, mid-dance party/s’mores-making

Saturday – concrete pour (not an official part of the birthday events, but part of the schedule nonetheless), hike to the green mountains near the neighborhood (same thing we did the weekend before, but it was such a nice break that we wanted a repeat), eat cheesy bread (the easiest way to make a good day into a great day), and watch the first half of North and South (a fantastic 4-part mini-series based on a book by Elizabeth Gaskell)

Selfie in the green mountains — The hiking crew! Me, Debbie, Julie, Jocelyn, and Dina and her daughter Rachel

Funky cacti surrounded by green — Weird green desert

Me with the green mountains — Such a pretty view!!

Green mountain view — Seriously, how much better is this than brown mountains?

The girls with their backs facing the camera, looking out over the neighborhood — Debbie, Julie, and Jocelyn were all wearing different EA shirts

Sunday – church, birthday brownies, and the second half of North and South

Me lighting the second candle on our birthday brownies — Birthday brownies!

Me and Julie with our brownie "cake" — The “birthday” girls

The weekend was a great success! Debbie and Jocelyn even obliged our request for presents and gave us chocolate bars and mini-Oreos. And they sang to us and let us blow out candles even though we hardly earned it. It doesn’t get much better than that! Everyone who participated in any or all of the events said that we need to do it again sometime, so we’re currently in the process of assigning every remaining weekend to someone’s birthday celebration. It’ll probably be Julie and my turn again in November. Kidding! But it was fun having an agenda for the weekend, and I think we all realized that we need to keep planning things to look forward to, or else time will go by without a passing glance.

Playa Yaya — This past weekend was slightly less eventful, but we dragged ourselves out of the house to the beach! (The beach looks kind of nice in this picture, but don’t be fooled. It’s pretty gross, to be honest, and you couldn’t pay me enough to go swimming in the water.)

We Have Floors!!!

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Lark

Rebar for the beams and the beginnings of the ceiling formwork

I feel like a broken record, but I’m going to say it anyway. Even after the team from Hudson left, the following two weeks were still chaotic. I’m sure you’re not surprised. More surprising would be if I actually said that a week was calm and relaxed. Ha! If there is such a thing as a calm week here, I have yet to experience it.

The Hudson team left on a Saturday night, and by Monday, we were already planning for the next team, coming just two weeks later. It seemed like an early start, considering we started planning for Hudson about three days before they came, but we had much more to figure out this time. This team was bringing electricians with them! We were all super excited about this, but probably no one more than I was. It’s nice to have people around who speak the same language (in this case, I’m referring to the language of electricity… hehe), especially because I’ve been trying to troubleshoot some problems, and it’s hard to do that without anyone to bounce ideas off of.

On top of that, we had a looong list of electrical projects for them to work on. It’s always exciting when people with very useful skills come, and we do our best to take advantage of their knowledge and abilities while they’re here. That meant that I had to do a lot of planning to make sure that they could work efficiently, like making diagrams showing what we wanted, figuring out how/where lights should be installed, and buying the equipment and supplies we needed to be prepared.

Besides the electrical stuff, we had a bunch of other mostly finished projects that needed to be completely finished sooner rather than later… so we were hoping that the team could get them done. Practically, I think that smaller teams are better because everyone can really get to know each other. When I’m puzzling over how we can possibly finish everything that we need to during a team week, I wish that every team had 40 people.

Sesame seed-covered cookie — Debbie and I were out shopping for supplies, and I smelled something amazing… usually the air smells like garbage, so this was an especially welcome change. I followed my nose to a little, hole-in-the-wall bakery, and Debbie asked what smelled so good. I had my doubts when the woman pointed to this cookie, but it was SO GOOD. Moral of the story: trust your nose.

Aside from the planning work, there was some extra excitement as well (I know, there’s always something extra). A few of the Hudson team members stayed for one more week to do a medical clinic, plus we had a short-term intern, Betsi, who arrived the night the team left and stayed for three weeks.

Debbie "proving a point" — It was Betsi’s birthday, so we went to buy her a cake! This is Debbie proving to me that she doesn’t need a new organization system in her purse because her car keys are “right here!” She has things from her purse under both arms and her chin while also balancing the cake box. (If you’re wondering why I’m not helping, I was already holding her water bottle and mine, some snacks we bought from the bakery, and our notebooks.)

Betsi with her birthday cake — Happy Birthday Betsi! It’s a Peruvian tradition to crack an egg on the head of the (un)lucky birthday person, but Betsi made it clear that she wouldn’t be happy. I’m with her.

The medical clinic was great! It’s run by a husband and wife, a doctor and nurse duo, plus their daughter, who have been doing this for the last few years. At this point, they have ongoing relationships with some of the patients which is pretty cool. Often, when medical groups come in, they focus on the kids in the program, but this one is primarily for the parents, staff, and people connected to them. It’s a big blessing for the people in our community to be able to visit a doctor who really knows what he’s talking about! I could tell you dozens of stories about doctor-related headaches here. It’s hard to find a doctor you can trust, and sometimes, it’s hard to find a doctor at all! Once, one of the kids had a medical problem, and the staff had to take her here, there, and everywhere to find someone who would help her. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for that to be your ongoing reality.

I only popped in a few times during the week, but it was fun to see the clinic in action. People asked questions about whatever aches and pains were plaguing them, they gave out reading glasses to people who needed them, one of the moms brought in her 1-month-old baby for a checkup… It made me so happy that all of these people could see a doctor who really cares and knows his stuff.

Illuminated waves — Night ocean views in Lima

Googly-eyed head with grass hair growing out of the top — One of the younger classes made these little seed-heads. I’m pretty sure they’re essentially pantyhose stuffed with dirt and seeds. Once the “hair” started growing, they stopped looking like creepy potatoes and started looking kind of cute! And hilarious. Do you like this one’s hair tie?

Googly-eye head with a haircut — This one is a little disturbing… someone cut his hair and now he’s sitting on a bed of his own hair clippings. Eek.

In construction news, THINGS ARE HAPPENING! I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that the building looks more and more like an actual building each day… I’m still in “foundations” mode where I think that we’re going to move at a snail’s pace for the rest of forever, and we’ll never make it above ground. Silly me because like I said in my last post, we have walls! And now we have the beginnings of windows! And WE HAVE FLOORS! And they’re working on making it so that there are CEILINGS too!

I know, I know. You’re thinking, “Duh, Lara. You’re just listing all of the parts of a building. You knew that they were building a building, didn’t you?” YES, I DID. But seeing it come together right in front of me is a whole bunch of insanity. And now, take a gander at the pictures and please also be awed by the fact that what was once a hole in the ground is now actually starting to look like something that could be recognized as a building.

Module 1 with completed brick walls — Finished walls in Module 1!

Module 2 with new walls — More walls in Module 2! And you can see the wooden formwork for a concrete bench in front of the building

Wall and columns in Module 2 — After they finished the brick for this wall, they poured the columns so that the entire wall/column structure is working together.

Brick wall with a column in the middle — Here’s one of the wall-integrated columns.

Window holes in Module 2 — This is how they frame out the windows in a brick wall. They basically pour mini-columns on the sides and frame out the top and bottom with steel and concrete.

Module 2 with formwork around the mini-columns — These are the same windows, now with the formwork for the concrete.

Window hole with concrete surrounding it — One of the finished window frames on Module 1. I’m so excited about these windows! These classrooms are going to have way more natural light than the other rooms we have.

Module 2 walls — The bench has been poured! (See above the blue tarp) and you can see the window wall going up in the background

The top 2/3 of this wall is going to be exposed brick, and the bottom 1/3 is going to be covered. Can you see the difference? The brick pattern on top is different, and they clearly put a lot more effort into making sure it looks nice and neat.

Freshly poured concrete floor in Module 1 — MODULE 1 FLOOR!!! It’s like a real room now! They were still in the process of pouring the back of the room in this picture.

Construction guys preparing concrete for the floors — The concrete mixing station. For big pours, they’ll call a concrete truck, but even for these floors, they mixed the concrete themselves using this concrete drum. Concrete, gravel, water, sand, repeat. Pour days are always VERY long, and I’m sure they’re exhausting.

Ground level view of the new floor — This is just the sub-floor, so there’s going to be another layer of concrete on top of this… but we have a floor!! Can you tell I’m excited?

Floors in Module 2 — Floor in Module 2! There’s a floor inside the classroom, plus they poured the walkway outside.

Concrete floor in the future staircase — Future staircase! It’s cool to see everything starting to take shape.

Sticks holding up some planks — Next step: ceilings! This is the very beginning of the “scaffolding” they built to hold the ceiling up.

Framing out the beams — These horizontal pieces of wood are where the beams are going.

More rebar for the beams — Almost finished with the beams!

Sticks to support the ceiling — Stick forest. Jocelyn was laughing at their strategy for making the sticks the height they need to be… what do you think? Seems very stable…

There you have it! See? It’s like a real building now. Hopefully you’re not bored of all of these construction pictures because there are many more to come. I think the process is fascinating! And sometimes mildly terrifying, but mostly fascinating.

Work-Life Balance

Posted on April 15, 2019April 16, 2019 by Lark

The weeks keep flying by, and if all of my drawings were ready and we didn’t have a deadline, that would be okay… but of course, my drawings aren’t ready, and the construction start date keeps creeping closer and closer. Well, it keeps creeping closer with the exception of the one little jump backward that it did, moving from May 1st to May 6th. But that’s where it’s staying which means I need to keep chugging along.

I stepped outside for my workout at exactly the right time this day. Check out that sunrise!

All in all, it was a good week. I finished the first draft of my floor plans and started working on the technical specifications which are definitely going to be the most tedious part of the job. That’s where you put all the details about how things should be constructed and what products should be used and such. I’m struggling for two reasons: 1. Even when I was working, I almost never touched the specs which means I don’t have a good reference point for what is really important to include. 2. Spanish. This is all technical Spanish, too, which means that I know approximately zero of the words. I suppose the vocab lesson will come in handy once construction starts, but right now, it’s just overwhelming.

The good news is that I have some example projects to use as references, so I started out by translating their specifications to help me decide what to include in mine. That was a fun day… if by fun you mean that I couldn’t even think straight by lunchtime because my brain was so fried. It’s good though. Now, I have the beginnings of my first spec attempt and a VERY long list of things to look up in the Peruvian electrical code… another task that, as you might imagine, I am SO looking forward to.

In other project-related news, here we are, three weeks from the start of construction, and we’re in the process of changing structural engineers. No big deal. Except kind of a big deal because from the sounds of it, practically everything with the structure is likely to change. The structure is like the bones of the building, the frame around which everything else is organized… so on the bright side, it takes some pressure off of me because I can’t finalize my plans without finalized structural drawings. On the less bright side, we’re supposed to be three weeks away from construction and we’re changing bones! This is where we trust and pray and hope that the new structural engineer likes to work long hours and can pull off a miracle. Whenever I get worried, I force a smile and tell myself, “It’s going to be great!” because maybe if I say it enough, it will be true.

These funky flowers are on a maracuyá (passion fruit) vine growing in the compound. I think they’re super cool because the flowers close at night and reopen during the day.

Personally, I’ve been having some struggles recently. One of the biggest is maintaining a work-life balance and figuring out what that even means in this context. We all live and work on the same property, 30m x 170m of walled-in desert. The physical separation between work space and personal space is about a 2-minute walk from work in the back of the property to home in the front. My coworkers are also my roommates are also my friends. Sometimes, work things creep into personal time, and when I try to maintain a boundary, I feel bad because technically, the work is the reason I’m here. I start wondering if I’m being selfish or needy for wanting some time to myself.

I know that’s not right, that even though I’m here for the job, I also have to live and function and have some sort of balance in my life. It’s hard though! It’s already hard enough to find a balance when you’re living and working in a normal situation, and this is not normal in any way.

Jocelyn and I have started a “Sunday night pancake” tradition. Pretty sure this is one of the things keeping me sane.

Hopefully this week can be a bit of a reset for me. We only have a three-day work week because of Easter holidays on Thursday and Friday, and some of us are going on a mini-vacation for a few days! Some time off the property will be good for me, and I have my fingers crossed for a fun and refreshing trip. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Return to Office Life

Posted on April 7, 2019April 16, 2019 by Lark

This week was rough. I know I said that the team week was hard, but I think I’m going to update my previous statement to say that the week after might be worse. At least there’s some excitement during team week because there are new people here and fun things happening. The week after, it’s like you’re trying to pick up the pieces of everything that completely fell apart while you were distracted.

I felt like I was getting sick at the beginning of the week, probably because I hadn’t been getting enough sleep and wasn’t exactly going easy on my body. In an effort to avoid a complete meltdown, I tried to get more sleep each night, skipped working out in the mornings to give my body a chance to recover, and used that extra time to pull other parts of my life back together. I also consumed lots of vitamin C which I know there are mixed opinions about whether or not it’s effective, but whatever. If there’s even a chance that it helps, I’m in.

The good news is that I think it might have worked. I wasn’t feeling great during the middle of the week, but it definitely never got to the point of feeling like I had a real cold. Maybe this is premature, but I’m going to count myself as healed and get back to running around like a crazy person next week.

Cemetery crosses with our neighborhood in the background — This small cemetery near our neighborhood was the destination of our “little walk”.

Our neighborhood — Brown, brown, brown. Desert living definitely isn’t for me.

Work-wise, things are going well. Oh! Exciting news… we have an official construction start date! May 1^st! We kept pushing it back and pushing it back and decided that if this is going to happen, we need to just pick a date and stick with it. This is kind of funny to me because meanwhile, I still have to finish my drawings, and May 1^st is in less than a month… but things here don’t work the same way they do at home. Technically, I don’t even need to have everything completely figured out before they start construction because the foundations come first, and they don’t affect me. I will be finished by then, though. I want to be able to focus on the construction when that’s happening instead of having to split my attention.

I can’t get over how crazy this is! I know in my head that I’m going to be here for the entire construction process of this building, but when I REALLY think about it, I’m like, this is insane! There’s (mostly) no building there now. By the time I leave, there will be a whole building and the things I helped to design will be inside. And I’m going to watch it happen from Day 1 until Day whatever when it’s finished. How. Cool.

Pretty pink flowers — You can find some color, but you have to search for it. We literally have green envy… some of our neighbors have SO MUCH green on their properties and I just want more plants in my life.

I really got down to business on my drawings this week. I feel like I have a good handle on things, but I definitely have a few more days of code brain ahead… aka the days when you spend all day reading code books and feel like your brain is made of mush by the end. That feeling is amplified here because I’m doing my best to use the Peruvian electrical code which means I’m combining Spanish brain and code brain, and the result is extra mush.

Aside from work and the threat of getting sick, things have been good! It’s fun living with Julie, Jocelyn, and Debbie (we have a little apartment-type space with three bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom. I share a room with Debbie). We’re starting to fall into a good rhythm. We’ve had a few very competitive game nights (with Paul too), and today we’ll have our second Sunday afternoon movie. It’s nice that we have time apart where we do our own things and also come together for fun activities. It’s basically summer camp haha.

Projected movie on the wall and my cake plate! — Last week’s Sunday movie was a celebration of the 20th birthday of “10 Things I Hate About You”. Julie and Jocelyn went all out and bought a cake to celebrate.

Anyway, my hopes for this week are to 1) stay not sick (healthy seems like maybe a stretch, so I’ll settle for not sick for now), 2) feel like I kind of have things under control again, 3) make good progress on the drawings, and 4) take some time to just relax and not feel like I need to always be working on something. Pray for me! I need it.