2012 Photo Report #4: Pipes & More Plumbing

NOTE: You can left-click on any picture to enlarge it and/or view all the photos as a slideshow.

One of the last major tasks for the New Jersey team this summer was to install the drains in the school's future lavatory building.

In the background you see the east end of what will soon be PROJECT BUCHANAN's first classroom facility (which I will tour with you in my next post).  In the foreground are the footings for the 30 ft X 30 ft lavatory building.  The pile of dirt in each 'room' will soon be leveled out so that Gordon and the team can start installing drainage pipes.

Viewed eastward from the school, you can see that the plan for this building is to have four separate restrooms--boys' and girls' (for students) and men's and women's (for faculty)--with breezeways through the building in both directions.

Many different lengths of pipe would be needed, but Gordon Tiner (right) had it all figured out.  All Jim Purcaro would have to do was take his small hand saw and cut the 20-ft lengths of PVC in all the right places and as straight as possible!  (I'm kidding, Jim... it was a big job and it did take you a long time to get it all done, out there in the hot sun!)

Gordon also said it was important to smooth off the raggedy cut ends of the pipes, so that later they would fit together properly when we glued them together.

So Jim measured each piece that was needed, ...

...sawed it, ...

...smoothed the cut end, ...

...and then explained to Prince why he was sure he had done it all exactly right!  (Actually, I made that up... I have no idea what Jim was saying when I took this photo!)

At the lavatory building, the four drain units we had assembled earlier have already been buried, one in each room.  As you can see, there will be four stalls in each room (with sinks on the opposite wall).

The drains from both front rooms needed to be routed to a central drain running out of the building at the back, so Gordon started assembling the pieces.

Then he applied the adhesive...

...and Flomo helped him force the pieces of pipe together.

A long section of pipe was laid in place...

...and then it was forced a short distance out the back wall.

Finally the drains from the two front rooms (behind me and the camera!) were connected to the long pipe leading to the exterior.

Everything fit together perfectly!

Gordon grabbed a level to check the pitch (slope) on the drain toward the outside...

...and that was looking good too!

Each of the 16 toilet drains, as well as the floor drain in the center of the breezeways, needed to have a foot-long vertical extension pipe added to it, in order to bring it above the level of the future floor slab.

Here Jim is cutting those extension pieces.  Three of them have already been glued to the toilet drains in the foreground, and the tops of these drain pipes have been capped off temporarily with duct tape.

Now Gordon has just glued the extension to the central floor drain.

To make sure all the horizontal sections of pipe would maintain the correct slope toward the outside, soil was gently shoveled in underneath them to support them properly...

...and then the pipes were covered over with sand.

Back in the 1980s, Edison (left) was one of my students at Oceanview Christian School in River Cess.  Now he lives in Buchanan with his family.  This afternoon, while we were laying drainage pipes at the lavatory, he showed up with his two sons and said that they had come out to the PROJECT BUCHANAN work site to volunteer for a few hours, wherever they were needed.  Wow!  They grabbed shovels and started digging a couple of ditches that were needed for burying the side drains (one is seen here).  During the following week, Edison came over in the evening to Gabriel's house where I was staying, and we hung out doing stuff on our laptops.  It was a great time for us to reconnect!

By the time I left Buchanan in early August, this is how far the work on the lavatory building had progressed: All the drains had been installed, the future 'washrooms' and 'breezeways' had been filled in with dirt and leveled over, and a pit for the school septic tank was almost finished (off to the right).  In the early dry season--perhaps in November--Flomo will cast the floor slab.  Hopefully when Gordon returns with another New Jersey team next February, everything will be ready for him to supervise the building of the walls.

Looking east you can see the end of the PROJECT BUCHANAN property where the peninsula juts out into the Benson River.  But just beyond the lavatory there is still enough level ground for another large building--a great place for the chapel/auditorium.  From here the view over the mangroves is quiet and peaceful in every direction!

2012 Photo Report #3: Plastering & Plumbing

NOTE: You can left-click on any picture to enlarge it and/or view all the photos as a slideshow.

While the New Jersey team was working on windows and ceilings, the Liberians who had been contracted to do the plastering were also very busy.

Flomo has been with PROJECT BUCHANAN since early 2010.  He has done much of the masonry in this building--from the foundations up.  In this series of pictures, it is his crew that is now doing the plastering.

All the cement plaster is mixed by hand--often right there on the floor in the room where it is going to be used.

The dry mix does not come ready-made.  Clean sand, hauled in by truck from the ocean beach a few miles away, is washed and rinsed ahead of time, or is just left out in the rain for a few weeks, to get rid of any salt.  Measured amounts of sand and dry cement are then dumped onto the floor and thoroughly mixed with a hand shovel.  Finally, water is added as needed to make the amount of plaster that can be used up before it starts to harden.

Wet plaster is delivered to the plasterer in whatever large open container is available.

A 'safe and secure' platform may consist of no more than a few boards laid across a couple of piles of broken blocks--or whatever else is available.  (Does it ever come tumbling down?  Occasionally.  Does anyone ever get injured?  Rarely!)

Now there's an idea for plastering at medium heights!  And it's easy to move this 'platform' along as needed, isn't it?

This is Tow-Gaa, a student who feels fortunate to have landed this summer job.

Out at the back of the house, the workers' scaffolding looks even more precarious, but actually it is quite secure.

In Liberia both the exterior and interior walls of a building this size are made from concrete blocks.  Any wood or wood products--especially if they were close to the floor where there is dampness--would attract termites almost immediately.

But locally-made concrete blocks also have a downside.  Generally they are manufactured by hand, often with the use of a welded, steel-plate mold that may have become quite wobbly and uneven with much use over time.  Consequently the blocks produced are almost never square, each one being a little different in shape than the next!  To compensate for this unevenness, the mason must lay each block a little differently, often with a very thick mortar joint to allow for these adjustments.  When all is done, the wall is usually plumb from top to bottom and level from one end to the other.

The easiest way to hide the irregular mortar joints is to cover every wall surface, both inside the building and out, with a thick layer of plaster.   This covers every blemish and makes the wall surface very smooth.

The final result really looks very good!  In this photo, you can compare the rough block wall that has not been plastered with the wall surface that has.

For people working with wet cement, the job must continue.  But for Gordon, Jim and Jason who have been working all morning on ceilings, it's time for lunch. 

"I never thought that spaghetti and corned beef sauce could taste so good--day after day after day!"

"That food Tabitha cooks is really great!  It really hits the spot!"

The plastering on the front wall of the house is making real progress.

Later the plasterers will come back around to do the finishing-up work around each window.

Eventually the plastering job around every window will look like this.  Then the entire building, inside and out, will be given several coats of lime whitewash, until every wall is glistening white.  And inside, every room will be as bright as you can make it--without electricity--on a rainy-season day!

This photo should give you some idea of how smooth the plastered wall is, and how nicely it has been finished alongside the door jamb (on the right).

Outside the house, Gordon Tiner has planned ahead for the septic system.  Before he returned to the States, this pit for a septic tank--4 ft wide X 6 ft long X 7 ft deep--was dug near the house, and another one twice as large was dug near the school.  Flomo is going to construct both septic tanks, as soon as the heavy rains let up and the ground dries out.  When Gordon returns next February, he hopes to work on the septic systems' leach fields.

It is the middle of the rainy season, and the porous ground is not as hard as it looks. The bright red and yellow hues are due to the high iron oxide content of the soil (which is typical across Liberia).

Back in 2010, when the floor slab for the house was poured, the drains were not installed properly.  Therefore corrections had to be made.  In this bathroom, the floor had to be broken up, and new drains put in...

...and the same thing had to be done in the second bathroom.

     Remember Tow-Gaa, whose picture you saw earlier?...  He was born in 1995 in the middle of Liberia's long and bloody civil war.  By the time of his birth, there had already been 5 years of brutality and terror.  An estimated 200,000 Liberians had lost their lives, and 1.8 million were in need of humanitarian aid.
     I do not know this young man's story.  I only know that Buchanan was not spared its share of bullets and bloodshed.  I can only imagine the long nights of anxiety and fear that his parents must have faced as his mother's due date came ever closer.  All over the country, child-soldiers had brutally ripped open other pregnant women.  The guns and the screams and the blood were all that anyone could think about.  Nothing else mattered.  There were no hopes and dreams.  There were no plans for the future.  There was no future.  Only today, and the fear of death.  The war was all-consuming.  And so when he was born, they named him Tow-Gaa--which means "War-Man" or "Boy of the War."
     Then there was a brief respite, but the end was not yet.  Four more years of conflict would follow--and it would get a lot worse before it got any better.  By 2003, when finally an uncertain peace returned to the land, a quarter million Liberians had died and a million had been displaced.
     Now Tow-Gaa was 8 years old, but of course he had not yet started school.  Today he is 17 and in grade 7.
     Sometimes I wonder: What do little boys, who were born in war, think about?  What about teenage boys, like Tow-gaa, whose earliest formative years were filled with fear and terror--what do they think about now?  Tow-Gaa attends a church school in Buchanan--but what does he really think about?  What does he think about God?