Orion's Belt

The longer you stare at the night sky the more stars are revealed. The patina of thinly spotted blackness dissolves and coloured spots of light twinkle into vision. The empty space between those spots is filled with a glowing cob-web of stellar illumination. Galaxies and constellations take shape

Under the stars, I think of our project in Ecuador. We had an idea that we would arrive in the country, proceed to work with Ainoa on our backs, helped by a small force of volunteers to finish the cob house and build a permaculture garden where we would grow most of our vegetables.

The longer we stay and work the more complexities and problems are revealed. The naïve vision dissolves and administrative realities make us spend time where we had not planned to spend it.

The water company's sense of humour.

Recently we lost water and spent a total of 14 days without drinkable water, and without any water at all for 12 of those days. I wish I could say this was a rare occurrence. The only thing to note this time was the extraordinary long duration of the stoppage.

Despite, although "in spite of" is more true to our feelings, all the misadventures and time wasted waiting in doctor's offices, lines at the utility company and Associasion Nacional de Transito, we have managed to complete more than nothing.

First, we have learned a lot. About ourselves, mostly. Call it knowledge, or wisdom -- the skein of accumulated experience that pulls judgement in one direction or another.

And then there's the house. It's not that we haven't worked on it, it's just that progress has been... well...

The first attempt at the house was rushed. We didn't level the site beforehand. The gravel trench was too shallow half around. We didn't tamp the bottom of the trench or the drainage gravel. The "rocks" we received for the stem-wall were actually aggregate full

Radiolarian is not rock.

of fossilised radiolarian, small mineral skeletons formed by oceanic protozoa eons ago, before the continental plates collided together and pushed up the Andean mountains; these "rocks" melted into a wet clay-like substance after the first big rain. We didn't use mortar between the rocks.

The second attempt, our current attempt, is much less rushed. We levelled the site roughly 2 meters around from the exterior of the walls. The gravel trench extends down a good 60cm under all parts of the exterior wall. We tamped the bottom of the trench and tamped again after each 15cm layer of drainage gravel. We built the stem wall with rocks we had ordered from a quarry. We are currently mortaring the rocks together to prevent the biting flies, cockroaches, mice, opossum and scorpions from sneaking in. The spiders we don't mind so much, especially since they tend to consume unwelcome insects. Even the brown-widows are guests on the outside-facing parts of the stem-wall.

Hello, Lycosidae friend.

Doing things properly takes a lot of time. The satisfaction of a job well-done comes at the price of an extended schedule and a lot of effort. We gladly pay this price, and then grimace as environmental variables double it.

Between the first and second attempts it rained and the radiolarian melted into the drainage gravel. We had to remove the radiolarian from the gravel trench, some of it with a 18-pound sledge-hammer, the wooden handle of which broke after three strikes and had to be replaced with a steel tube. The remaining gravel was covered with a layer of concrete-like organic matter that prevented drainage. We continued to have rain. The layer of radiolarian turned into a gooey glue which no amount of sifting would remove. So we shovelled the gravel out of the trench and spread it out on the ground to dry it in the sun and air. When it had dried we sifted it twice and carted it over to the new site by wheelbarrow.

Hard work.

We filled the gravel trench on the second site and tamped it. We began dry-stacking the rocks we had moved from large piles next to the first site. Some were so heavy we had to roll them the 15m into place. After dry-stacking, we began to mix cement and sand to make mortar. Mortar mixes require a good amount of water available, both for incorporation in the mix and for wetting and cleaning tools. Monthly water outages are common in the region, sometimes for up to five or six days per month. When we began to mix mortar we lost water on the third day, for four days. On the fifth day the water came back and we lost electricity in the afternoon. Of course, our mixer is electric. The next day electricity was restored. Two days later we lost water, for four days, and on the fifth day the water ran from the faucet dark grey, all day. So we came down to Quito for a week, from where I write now.

Siga no más

"Siga no más:" the first Spanish phrase I taught to Oliver.

"Go ahead; Proceed; Continue; Carry on." Those three words carry these ideas in Ecuadorian Spanish.

Oliver came to us fresh from his apprenticeship with the Cob Cottage company. He is a young man ripe with ambition and for five weeks he worked alongside us to accomplish the next stage of our project. In natural building they say that planning and foundations are the most intensive stages of building. We made use of Oliver's tremendous physical efforts to proceed swiftly through these stages. Just look at the materials we obtained:

• 10m^3 of gravel infill for drainage in the foundation trenches
• 36m^3 of stones for the stem wall
• 27m^3 of clay-filled soil for cob mix
• 16 bales of straw for cob mix

I'm excited to say that materials are nothing without hard labour. As we swung shovels, heaved rocks, and laboured away with chisels and sledge hammers, we realised the formal beginnings of the house. We dug the foundation trenches, filled them with gravel, stacked the stem-wall to near completion, poured a concrete column and built a brick wall for the installation of electric and water connections and finally erected a frame for the dry toilet. A fine list of accomplishments for only five weeks!

There are many stories to tell, and I hope to regale you readers with them in the coming weeks as the machinery of this blog spins back to motion.

Oliver left Ecuador on October 1st, early in the morning. He plans to look for work from Seattle and he hopes to begin a contracting business in Guatemala when he has earned sufficient start-up capital. 

Oliver, triumphantly appraising the poured cement column and
2.5m galvanised steel tube assembly.

Thank you, Oliver, for your hard work! Best of luck in your future endeavours.

Connecting to the grid - May 2013

Here’s a quick summary of what I had to refresh myself on about electricity while we installed our system. Alternating Current, or AC, is a current which periodically reverses direction, expressing itself as a sine wave, meaning that there is a period during every pulse of electricity when no power being delivered to the system. This period is extremely brief, however it is noticeable with adequately fast recording devices; electronic engines built for AC have compensatory mechanisms to provide for their smooth running. Direct Current, or DC, is a steady, direct line of power.

In addition to current type, there are two basic modes of delivery: mono-phasic and bi-phasic. Mono-phasic, as we have in Ecuador, carries the AC current over a single cable, biphasic carries two staggered AC currents over two different cables, and both have an additional grounding cable. Whereas mono-phasic systems are in a powerless period of flux for the entire “negative” or “reverse” of their sinusoidal pulse, biphasic systems combine the staggered currents, resulting in a shorter “reverse” flow period and a more efficient system. For our installation the significance of this is that electric connections in Ecuador have only a positive and a ground, as opposed to a positive, a negative and a ground.

We began the electrical installation with a single wooden poll we placed at the front right side of the house. We strung a thin metal wire from the utility poll at the properties edge to our installed poll by the house and then from that poll to the brick and concrete column supporting the roof atone corner of the small ground-level porch abutting the front entrance. To this wire we attached a super-flex cable: three smaller cables fit into a large rubber tube. When we bought the main cable to carry the current from the utility poll to the house we didn’t yet know that Ecuador uses a mono-phasic system and therefore only needs two cables, the positive and the ground. The price difference is about ¢0.70 per meter, and at over 50 meters of cabling we lost $35 through our ignorance; the next day we bought proper mono-phasic cabling for the lights and electric outlets. Next, we put a hole into the brick wall just below the ceiling at the convergence of the front porch walls, and we fit the super-flex cable through the PVC

tubing we are using as cable housing. On the other side of the wall the super-flex cable passes into a side-hole in a plastic housing box attached to the wall and passes out of a bottom-hole to continue into the fuse box. From there we have the cables for the lights and outlets (much smaller in diameter than the super-flex cables) leave in tubing and run their current to two outlets and a light in our room, one outlet (connected to the super-flex because we needed more volts for the washing machine) and a light in the larder, and an outlet and light in the guest bedroom. We’re waiting until we progress more on the house to buy more materials for connecting the two lights and kitchen outlet outside on the rear veranda. Wire, cabling, PVC tubing and wall mounts, screws, outlets, light switches, lights, fuses and fuse box all included we paid about $400 for the electric system.