Reynaldo in Ghana

The next day, Saturday, I was involved in constructing a room for a relative who lived next door.  Once again, I saw the power of communal labour in a village.  There were two expert builders but everyone else was helping out.  We started levelling the ground with hoes and then setting down the first level of blocks.  Since the soil here is very suitable for building, you can make blocks (earthen bricks) by using soil just directly from the ground and adding water.  In other regions, you may have to add concrete to add more strength to the soil but in Navio apparently, this is not necessary.  So, these blocks were prepared in advance and were ready and waiting to be used that day.

After the first layer, we needed to make mortar.  To do this, you simply take a hoe, a lot of water and then remove your shoes.  You pour the water onto the soil, stamp the soil with your feet and then use the hoe to mix the water with the soil.  After doing this for a bit, you will be able to make quite a strong mortar.  The other neat aspect about building this way is that you can actually reuse all your old building materials.  In this case, the new room we were building was to expand the compound so previously, they had destroyed the old rooms.  The remains were lying there and after adding plenty of water and hacking at it with the hoe, the old walls and blocks had become mortar that we used for the new room.  Perfect recycling!  I was very impressed.

The other impressive aspect about this building project is the teamwork that I had already alluded to before.  Once the foundation was laid and everything was ok, everybody joined in to mix the mortar, carry the mortar to the various parts of the wall and then apply the mortar join the blocks.  Essentially there were five types of tasks:  Mortar mixing, mortar carrying, mortar application, brick laying and water fetching.  First, about 10 or more women fetched the water from the well and filled a large container.  From this, the mortar mixers took small buckets to spread the water over the new mortar area.  They took off their shoes and then were stamping the newly moistened mortar and using the hoe to add more earth to the mortar-water mixture.  The sections of mortar that were ready for application were shovelled onto empty bags that two people would carry from the mortar mixing site to the different points on the wall where others were busy applying the mortar.  The mortar application was done by hand as well with the first task being to make sure that the slots between the blocks were well-filled without any gaps.  The second step was to add a new layer of mortar onto the top of the bricks.  Once the new layer was ready for the blocks, the mortar appliers would form a human conveyor belt to bring the blocks from the block pile to the various points on the wall. Throughout this process, the two builders made sure that the wall was straight and inspected and corrected brick positioning.  

While this process is quite simple to describe, in practice doing each one of the steps carries its own challenges either in terms of skill, strength or insects.   For instance, the mortar mixing is quite hard work and then sometimes you happen upon an ant nest and then your feet can be quite sore with ant bites. The mortar carrying is also not an easy task and especially learning how to swing the sack in coordination with the other person and to deposit the mortar at the desired place without losing half of the mortar to either side of the wall is a challenge.  Also, the higher the wall becomes, the more difficult the lifting of the mortar and the bricks becomes. 

Overall, it was quite an amazing experience of communal labour but also quite an exhausting first day in the village.  The evening, was taken up by a soccer game and after a very long day, I lay down and was asleep almost instantly.