Category: Argentina

It took me four months to get the foundations of the house poured, and up to the floor. It has taken only two weeks for the two men working on my house to get it to the roof stage.

The difference? Apart from two of them working on it full time, which helps, it is the knowledge and experience that they have. I remember watching the building progress in Corrientes YWAM when I was there, but these guys are many times faster. The first two walls were built within a day.

Both walls were built on the first day that the guys turned up to work.

Pouring the concrete ring around the top that holds the walls together and provides a platform from which to add a second floor if needed.

Seeing the roof go on was one of the most rewarding phases of the building process.

There was a problem in the building. A water problem. A hot water problem actually. So I fixed it.

The cause of our problems was this water tank being too low.

The hot water problem turned out to not be a hot water problem at all, but rather a general water problem that came back to the simple issue of not enough water pressure. Although here we have mains water, the pressure at which it arrives at our door is not sufficient and is too variable for most uses. Combine this with 24hr water cuts throughout summer and the need to store water in some sort of tank becomes very important for an uninterrupted supply.

Raising this tank up high enough gives us some very nice water pressure too. But that was our very problem now. We had a tank, but it was not high enough to give us the pressure that we needed. You see, this tank supplies not one shower, but four. As it was, we could use one shower without problems, but with the second shower going, both people needed to hug the wall as the water dribbled out of the shower heads.

It had been quite some time now since I had heard the cries of the girls – for it was the girls bathroom that was affected here – and after several months nothing had yet been done. So one day I set about correcting the problem and raised the tank.

A sign on the door (no water for one week) and some cutting of pipes, and soon the tank was off its low stand, resting on the roof. First task completed. It then took three days to build up the wall to a height 1.25 metres higher than it was before. I stopped here because it was at this point that I could no longer reach up to place more bricks on the wall. Besides, it seemed like a good height now.

The team of guys needed to lift the tank safely onto its new wall.

Lifting the tank up was not as easy as we first thought, and needed a team to help out. Once in place we needed to fit longer pipes and then check it all worked. It didn’t.

Our first problem was water leaks. After some scary acrobatics in climbing in and around the tank to replace the broken bits and seal up the leaks, we were ready to test things out again. This time it worked.

One of my unstable platforms on the roof that was needed to fix the leaks.

With four showers now working we added some showerheads, replaced some broken bits, and ran new pipes to the toilet cisterns so that everything was now working, bringing the girl’s bathroom up to a fully functioning standard.

Now I hear no more complaints from the girls about their bathroom.

The foundation walls completed, waiting to be filled with dirt and then covered with concrete.

It has been a hot morning and a lot of work but here we are, just before lunch, cleaning up our tools. The floor is done, one of the biggest tasks in building a house, conquered in a morning. I could not have done this without help. It was interesting really that only the night before, while praying, I felt that help with the house would be coming soon. Little did I know just how soon.

It was that very night, a little later, that I was approached by some people that I knew vaguely who asked me about the house. They were here for the graduation ceremony of the Discipleship School that had just finished. One of them, Daniel, was the only person that I really knew, as he had helped me with information on how to build what I had built until now. I was soon to learn that the others were his wife and father-in-law.

Standing next to the dug foundations of the house.

In reply to their question I told them that things had been progressing pretty slowly until now as there had been many other tasks required of me around the base that took my time away from the house. They glanced amongst themselves and then looked back at me. “Why don’t we come tomorrow and help you out?” was their response.

How exciting was that. I woke early the next morning and waited eagerly for them to arrive. They turned up right on time in their old truck, loaded up with tools, bars, ropes, and a well used but highly valued cement mixer. Before long we were all set up and work began.

Pouring the first concrete into the foundations. The plastic is to protect the house from rising damp.

Daniel mixed up the first load of concrete while his father-in-law, a man who has worked in construction his entire life, prepared the floor to receive its layer of concrete. Soon we were all working together, making concrete as fast as we could and wheelbarrowing it up a plank to pour it out on the floor.

Eight buckets of gravel, two of cement, half a big bucket of water, and now add sand to get the consistency right. A little more gravel, bit of water, and… that’s it, ready. Another load of concrete to pour out and form more of the rapidly forming floor. Time rushed by. Before I knew it we were done. The entire floor, a space of 16m² was finished and it still was not yet lunch time.

Getting help in filling up the base with a solid dirt fill.

With the help of Daniel and Ortega, his father-in-law, we had finished the floor in well under half of the time it would have taken me had I attempted it alone. But the best part was that I had no idea how to continue. With their extensive knowledge in construction we were able to speed up the time needed to finish the job tremendously, and I was able to learn many things from them in the process.

So now I have a floor. There is a lot more yet to be done, but I have a floor. A FLOOR! The house is finally taking shape.

It did not happen as expected, with yet another day of delays after expecting to pick it up yesterday, but finally today, at the last hour of the day – 9pm – I was able to pick up the finished truck. Tomorrow I pay for it.

It was wonderful to be mobile again and whizz past the kilometres of road that we have walked countless times now. On arriving back at the base I sounded the horn to let everyone know… but they were all already yelling and screaming for joy and relief that we once again had our transport back.

Finally we are mobile again, and just because we now could, everyone piled into the truck and we headed out for a trip around the town, travelling from one side of the city to the other, along the coast and in the back-blocks, stopping at both of the known lookouts over the city to enjoy the views of the bay and the lights before us.

What joy it was to only sit and let the engine (and gearbox) do its job of moving us along. Never have I enjoyed motorised transport so much as now, after walking everywhere for three weeks from a place that is over 6 kilometres from the city. Mobility is such a wonderful thing.

And we are mobile once again. Yahoo!

Finally the truck is fixed. A job that was going to take a little more than one week has turned into three. Three weeks is not that long I guess, and it could have been worse. However, after being told that it would be just over one week, and assured every day that there was only one little problem, the three weeks have certainly seemed a lot longer than normal.

So what happened to make it so long?

First it was in getting the gearbox out. Three little bolts refused to let go and it was three days later, after pulling half of the truck apart so they could cut them out that the gearbox could finally be removed.

Next came news of the parts. We thought they were all there and available, to be delivered within days. One and a half weeks later they arrive. It turns out that there are many variations of the same part and what they had was different to what we needed. Instead of sending them down straight away, a search was made throughout the country for the bit that we needed. I guess it came from the furthest corner to take that long.

Finally with the parts arriving I was anxious to get the truck back. Walking six kilometres to the city and back each day through swirling dust acted as a great motivator to check on the progress of the repairs.

Arriving at the workshop I discover everything closed. Checking the time, I was here at the right part of the day and everything else was open, so I was a little confused. The first day I let it go, but on the second day, with everything still fully closed and nobody answering their telephones, I thought it worth finding out what was happening. In asking around the news was that the entire workshop was on vacation. Worse was that their vacations extended past the day that they had told me the truck would be ready.

Finally they came back to work, and started the job. Yesterday I was supposed to pick it up but it still was not finished. It turns out that not only were there many other cars being worked on, but also the workshop was so crowded that there was no room to get the truck inside so they could work on it.

So after multiple delays, it looks like today is the day that I pick the thing up. I have not been by the workshop yet, but am heading over there in a few hours in good faith that it really will be ready.

More news on that one soon.

It was amazing really. After travelling around the country for two weeks with Brodie (see his blog: Jellycan), the truck broke only once I got back home. By one day. Oh, and it is not my truck either – sorry Mike.

I had returned home and during our travels the engine had been missing and getting worse, so the next day I headed out to our neighbouring town of Trelew, about 60kms away, to get it fixed. The computer that Ford in Trelew had would tell us exactly what was causing the problems… but I never got there.

This is the truck that just broke.

While driving on the main highway there briefly came a noise for a couple of seconds that then disappeared. It sounded more like the wind than the gearbox, until it returned again only seconds before a bang. At that point a puff of smoke came out from around the gearstick and smelt distinctly like powdered metal. The motor suddenly revved freely. 5th gear was gone.

With 5th gear gone, I tried changing to 4th and discovered that it still worked. Now because I heard no other bad sounds, I figured that the box was still ok and I had all the other gears. It was likely that only a part of 5th had broken and was now sitting out of harms way on the bottom of the gearbox. I was half-way and decided to continue, partly because turning on this busy route was not a good option and partly because the damage seemed less than I was soon to discover.

On reaching the service stations outside Trelew, I slowed down and shifted into 3rd gear but there was nothing. A freaky feeling hit me at that point. I tried 2nd, nothing. 1st, nothing either. There were no gears at all other than 4th. By this stage I was going slow, and realised that if I stopped I may end up stranded completely.

Not knowing the town in which I was in nor any workshops where I could take the car, I prayed about returning to my home town, now 60kms away. After prayer I felt sure that it would be safe to proceed, so at 80km/h I nursed the vehicle back to Puerto Madryn. There were no unusual sounds, no strange smells or other problems, and I arrived safely.

The next problem was where to go. To take the truck back to where I am living would not have helped to repair it, so I took it to the only place I knew of – the Ford dealership. This is the most expensive place in town. They gave me quotes of from $6,000 to $8,000 pesos and a minimum of three weeks to do the work. It was looking pretty bad.

Today however, I moved the truck to another workshop where Raul will start work tomorrow. They have quoted somewhere around $4,000 to $5,000 pesos depending on what they find when they open up the gearbox. So by this time tomorrow we should know just how severe the damage is. Currently we are thinking that maybe one of the main gears has disintegrated and the rest of the box is fine…

…but until we look inside, nobody really knows.