A few days after my birthday I decided to take on the responsiblity to put up plastic walls (basically) to create a more private showering area. Our pila is located right in front of our house and we have a good amount of neighbors that come by thus necessating privacy for bathing. (See pictures)
I spent a good amount of the morning looking through our yard for long branches and with a machete cut and trimmed them to use for wrapping the plastic around. I also trimmed the grass around the pila as it was quite long. All of this took me about an hour as I needed to barrow a machete from our neighbor. After lunch I told Mauricio that I was going to put up the plastic and asked if I could barrow a shovel. Although he had just finished showering and had a meeting to go to he told me let´s go do it together.
When he arrived at the house he asked if I had a post-hole digger, since I didn't know what that word was in spanish I had not so he asked the neighbor (which at this point I suspected had quite a lot of tools) if we could barrow theirs. When he looked at my branches/poles he quickly decided that they were too small and told me to start with the holes and he would come back. After I had finished two of the holes he returned with three 8-10 foot trunks that were each individually quite heavy. (Now something equally as noteworthy is that Mauricio only has one arm as his right was amputated during the war.) Quickly, as Mauricio had a meeting to get to however nonetheless insisted he could stay and help until the end, we finished with the holes, put in the new branches, cut the long plastic to stretch around the poles, cut cardboard to use with nails to attatch the plastic to the poles (I was just going to use Duct Tape), and nailed the plastic on (which turned out to be much better as we could stretch the plastic tighter) in probably the next 10 minutes.
I still had questions as we had two open spaces left, a smaller one by the house and the second leading into the pila. I was able to figure out that we could use a plastic shower type curtain in front but the spot by the house still troubled me. Without really speaking Mauricio understood what I was thinking and we both looked at a piece of aluminum roofing that was removed a week earier from our house. The piece was much too long to fit but in a blink of an eye he found a stick, put on top of the aluminum, bent the aluminum over it and placed it perfectly into the open space.
This quick action that might have taken me 20 minutes to process/figure out and I couldn't help but marvel at this rapid action for various reasons. One, this isn't the first time he found things lying around to use for building purposes; when we were working on the pila before we left for the states he grabbed old sandel to smooth out the cement finish on the washing top of the pila. Two, how quickly we finished a project that I had taken an embarassing hour to do simple steps. I've found myself having to set my pride aside in our house projects as I have more to learn from the people like Mauricio here. The third was the humbling nature that he has continued to help us out with our house. The branches/trunks were probably from his house which he gave away, he had just taken a shower and was drenched in sweat from the work, and he was in the end late for his meeting. These interactions continuously occur with our friends and neighbors often leaving us with insuficiente vocabulary to voice our thanks. We only hope that one day we can return the good will that we have recieved.
-Posted by Tom
