Friday was a day for putting some projects to rest. The men on site from Fisnik’s firm put the stucco and white-wash on the walls they had erected over the course of the week. The crew of four worked well, but it was more than a little tense to have them on site while my crew worked as well. There was only one water source, and one power source. The visitors seemed to feel entitled to the use of our tools. Lines are not easily drawn here, because the law is so unreliable. Violence is often answered by violence; rarely by the legal system. Individuals need to decide in an instant if this bag of cement, or this shovel is really worth dying over. The members of my crew have decided that they cannot work in tandem with these other men; a conclusion I am forced to concur with.
Sajmir and Agim spent the day pouring the slab for the gabina behind the church. The gabina will be the outdoor shed that houses the back-up electrical generator. At the University of Washington they offer a class called something like “Construction Methods and Materials.” The first four week of this course focus on concrete. The professor I had for this class would spend each day showing dozens of slides of construction sites and the like; giving explanations for about what the slide portrayed. One of the slides was of an etching from a few hundred years ago in which a crew of men are depicted as working a concrete slab while standing on it. “This artists rendering is of course wrong,” I remember him saying. “You cannot stand on concrete as it is being poured.”
In the front of the church Ervis, Fatjon, and I worked to make the trench ready for the plumber Mariglen to repair the pipes we ruined yesterday with the back-hoe. I could not have imagined how expensive these repairs would be. The water pipes were of German design and manufacture. The junctions have embedded heat coils which melt the pipe at its ends in order to connect them. In order to take the materials we needed, Mariglen and I drove out to a fairly remote farm house north of town. Thankfully Mariglen knew how to perform the work required of him.
We were able to finish the repairs and hook up the last pieces of our sewer and water run-off systems by day’s end. At 4PM, quitting time, we had not begun to fill the meter plus deep trench in with material. We could have left it for tomorrow, but our neighbors rely on this road for access to their houses. In our discussions with them before hand, we promised to only interrupt their coming and going for two days. We stayed late, and left things better than we had found them.
albaniacalling 