Building Construction

In a country where labor is inexpensive many things are done by hand that in Europe or America would be done mainly by machines.  Home construction here is a very human intensive event.  Just about everything is made from concrete.  Walls are made from made from concrete blocks.  The blocks are made onsite using sand, cement, gravel, and water.  The mixture is poured into forms and either manually pounded to prevent air gaps or made using a small machine.  The blocks are set out to dry on the construction site and when they have enough blocks they will start a wall.  The load bearing walls are made much like everywhere else, steel rebar is used to provide strength and wood forms are created to give the general shape of the building. As the walls go up, elaborate supports made from bamboo and some metal scaffolding are built to hold forms for the floors in place.  

In what can only be described as an amazing feat of humanity, the way concrete floors are poured is something to behold.  Almost everything is done by hand, the only piece of machinery is one mixing drum.  Everyone has a 5 gallon bucket.  The sand, concrete, water, and gravel are scooped by hand into the bucket and thrown into the mixing drum.  From there a line of people wait with their bucket to be filled with wet concrete.  They put the bucket on their head which I would guess weighs about 50 pounds (23 kg).  We saw people working on the 4th floor of a building this weekend, so that meant that they had to carry these buckets of concrete up wooden ramps to the top, drop their load and then walk back down again.  There were between 50 - 75 people, men and women both, carrying concrete to pour this 1,500 sq foot (140 sq meter) floor.  The floor must be finished in one "pour" for strength so they work from sun up until till the floor is finished, sometimes well into the night.  We passed by at 8:30 pm and they were still hard at work.  I really can't fathom how tired you must be after doing that for 14 hours straight! 

In general the daily wage here is 1,000 Nair (about $6).  A week's worth of groceries for a family of 4 is about 5,000 Naira.  The pay for a day's labor doing this is around 2,500 Naira.  This is well above the average daily wage but this is work that will age you quicker than most any other job.  I truly admire the hard work these people do in order to feed their families and send their children to school.  A few weeks ago we saw a truck with a concrete crew of about 15 women, 4 men, and a cement mixer at 10 o'clock at night.  They had just finished work and were headed home, with any luck they would make it there by midnight.