Fargo Brook Times, Andean Edition: Concrete

I have finally figured out why everything is so tranquilo here in Ecuador: no one has to winterize. Even in the high Andes, you don't need to know the R-factor of your insulation since no house is ever insulated. You don't buy weather stripping or line your foundation with hay bales. You don't fret about whether you can afford those double-paned windows. You don't even worry about the wind coming in through windows -- no one even uses caulking, as far as I can tell. You don't need to tune up your snow-blower, buy a new one, or line up a plow guy. You don't have to take down your gutters or rake your lawn one last time. You don't lay up a few cords of wood for the stove. And you certainly don't worry about heating oil prices or whether your August pre-buy is going to pay off come February.

You don't have to get ready for winter because winter here means rain and more moderate temps, thanks to warm Pacific Ocean currents. Make sure that you have a roof, and you're basically set. Aside from some corrugated tin (more popular in the campo and on the coast), most of the roofs here in Otavalo are made out of concrete reinforced with rebar, even if there's tile laid over the top. Actually, just about anything you could want to build is concrete and rebar, like say, a dinosaur or a volcano slide.

So aside from glass windows, maybe ceramic floors, and paint, all you need to build a house is concrete and steel. Like most Ecuadorian design and material, it's practical. Cool in the sun and warm enough -- with an alpaca blanket or two -- on "cold" nights. Not surprisingly, albañils, or masons, are in high demand -- and many are true artists with mortar, though "artisan" is a better word since there aren't too many free-stylin' 'crete-slingers. Of course, most people don't hire a mason or any other type of craftsman and say: "just go for it; do whatever you feel, man."

But albañils are amazingly adept at working with what they have, in space and material. Our landlord hired a maestro to tile our floor and then to make a cook-top, which he did by building two 3' deep half-walls out of cinderblocks and mortar, laying rebar across the top, layering in stiff cement, and then tiling the top with the spare bits of ceramic he had -- in an hour or so. Not exactly an aesthetic triumph, but it serves the purpose. Conversely, one artistic trick is to make a concrete/rebar post look like a tree-trunk by shaping and scoring it. We met a painter/musician whose house above Lake San Pablo looks like a hobbit lair, all curves and wood-framed windows -- and all in 'crete.

On the commercial side, guys can frame a building with astonishing speed. A huge new multi-story building in town was just framed in two weeks -- and some say you need 15 days for the concrete to set! When a new building is going in, the first you see is the rebar cylinders go in for the posts, sometimes supported with bamboo, bending under their own weight. (These guys must plumb the columns as they work upward.) The rebar post-frames are always taller than the building will be, and often they are left sticking out well after the building is complete. Once the posts dry, the ground and first floors go in, supported with a latticework of forms and supports. You don't have to dig down a few feet below the frost-line when there's no frost-line -- the foundation just goes right into the forms dug into the ground.

Two doors down from us, they are putting in a new Hall of Justice, two four-story buildings connected by an aerial walkway, which dominates most of the block. When we moved to Otavalo in late July, the thing was barely excavated and framed. Now in January, they are working on the finishing details. This wouldn't really be that amazing, except for the fact that most of the work -- at least 99%, mixing, moving, excavating, landscaping and all -- is done by hand. And this is a gov't job, hecho a mano!

By the way cement, concrete, and mortar are different things, though I tend to use the terms interchangeably. Concrete has cement in it -- which paired with water is the chemical binding agent -- but it also has sand and stone. Mortar has sand and lime sometimes, is much thinner than concrete, and is used specifically between bricks and blocks. Given that, there are many tints and shades on the palette.

And there must be at least as many ways of mixing concrete as there are cultures. I've seen a couple of them here in the northern Andes, and all of them start with a big old pile of cement. Sand and rock are usually mixed in to make the material go a bit further. One method is the volcano, where shovelers make a manageable pile of cement, sand and stone -- enough for whatever they are doing at the moment. Then they put a big crater in the center and fill the crater with a pool of water. Several shovelers begin working around the circle, working the water, sand, rock, and concrete together. When the concrete is ready, they shovel it into a wheelbarrow, truck it off, and shovel it out.

Getting the concrete on a building inevitably requires a whole lot of shovel slinging. At a building site around the corner, I watched a guy throw cement from a wheelbarrow onto the ceiling. It seemed to me that if he got half of it to stick, he was lucky. Not to waste it though, another guy shoveled up the slop into a bucket and handed it back up the slopper on the scaffolding. I guess that beats putting it on one trowel-full at a time. After the mud is slapped on, they go over it with a board to make it flush. All of this is is done by eye. Efficiency, baby -- get it up, get it on, smooth 'er out, and don't look back… until the next layer goes on.

One might get the impression that there is a lot of building going on around Otavalo, and there is. It's striking really. Other than hearing that building something is a great way to launder Colombian drug money, there are a lot of people doing work around here, whether new buildings or works-in-progress. And there are many works progressing at a ponderous pace. It is common to finish a ground floor and move in before you move on to the first floor (we call it the second); it's certainly more economical, but no one seems to be in a rush to finish that next floor. You see a lot of framed out second or third floors, which are good, among other things, for hanging laundry in during the rainier months, drying corn or reeds for mats, or keeping your dogs on their own floor so that they can bark at the various passersby.

Otavalo is so big on concrete that the multi-national corp, Lafarge put up 120 million bucks to build a plant on a hill just outside of the city, "in a record 18 months," says the website. Completed in 2009, the new plant "doubles the cement production capacity of Lafarge in Ecuador, which now reaches 1.6 million tonnes per year." The website does not state that the $120 million was used to undercut local labor. Lafarge imported an entirely Chinese workforce, built a barracks and commissary and left local Ecuadorians out of the loop, despite the fact that Mr. X. Abad, Ecuadorian Minister of Industry was there to cut the ribbon, and despite the fact that the Lafarge group topped 19 million euros in sales in 2009. I guess that's why the Minister of Labor was absent. With 10 to 20 bucks a day as a common rate for laborers here, it's hard to imagine what the Chinese took home at the end of their 18 month stay.

Lafarge talks about a "dynamic market," which it most certainly is, and also of maintaining rigorous "environmental standards," which includes sending 40 dump-trucks per hour over the ridge into the pristine Intag region to pick up sand for their operations and come back. I wonder who is contracted for the concrete on the new, paved road to Intag for the copper mine.

Anyhow, I was talking about concrete on the small, hand-made scale. Blocks, bricks, tiles, and pipe are made by hand. Guys often use a mixer to prep the cement, sometimes a shaker to pack more cement down into the block-forms (value-added, and advertised as such) -- but it's shoveled into mixers by hand, shoveled into forms by hand, moved to drying stacks by hand, loaded into and off of trucks by hand. So, if you look at a tiled street, and most of the streets in Otavalo are dry-set tiles, you see a whole lot of manual labor.

Which is why I have such a hard time reconciling this image of immense human effort with the laid-back attitude of the snow-less folk. How does every one and every thing moves at a mellow pace on the equator? Yes, you might mix -- or more likely here in this wealthy city, hire guys to mix cement. But there's no timetable to beat. Doesn't even matter if it's raining; dudes will be out there throwing on a skim-coat of cement or paint at the same pace they move under the sun: casual but steady. It's not like you have to get that on before it gets too cold.

Look at just about any building in Otavalo, and you'll see that they've only finished the facade. The sides are left as bare cinderblock. And why not? Someone's bound to build on the side eventually, so why worry? It's not like you have to build to code, since there doesn't seem to be one. No one is submitting plans to obtain a permit, especially when you're just going to build up. Sure, in Ripton or Starksbrah, you can just build what you want, but in most of the rest of Vermont, you need a permit to build a chicken coop or an outhouse. Here, you just put your chicken coop on the "roof" and take a wizz in the spare lot next door.

And look at any paint or tile job on a building, and you see the evidence slopped all over the sidewalk. As a "professional" painter, I'd have a drop-cloth down, but here, no pasa nada -- doesn't matter. Inside, there're drips and splatters all over. No big deal -- there's no obsessive finishing, eliminating every little blemish -- here, you just move on. Look in a corner, nothing is really square -- but it's solid, sound, and concrete. You want to plant trees on the sidewalk? Lay down the concrete first, then poke a hole in it. Same goes for running electrical conduits and water: concrete first, knock holes in it later. I have to admit that this attitude is refreshing and liberating. As long as it gets done, eventually, no one is coming around to scrutinize your work.

At some point in linguistic history, concrete became an adjective, as in, "we need to make a concrete plan." To me this means you can shape it to what you want before it sets. Or after it does solidify, you can knock a hole in it wherever you need to. This makes more sense down here because adjectives are more malleable than nouns, more flexible, easily traded out for a new one. That, and you need more nouns to get ready for winter: stove, splitter, wood, plow. In Ecuador it seems, you're always swapping out nouns for more flexible adjectives: you can be apretado or flojo, tight or loose; your wood might be wet, but it dries; and the the house is warm in the sun and cool at night. And if it's too cold, no worries -- you can just get yourself another blanket.

Looks sketchy, but bamboo makes good scaffolding.

Rebar for a post, and rebar for the antenna

Blocks drying -- it takes about 15 days. Then they're stacked and ready for purchase.

Rebar magic

Covering up for a little sprinkle of rain

The cement-shaker and a guy on the cement pile he's using to make the blocks. The dueña kept thinking I wanted to buy blocks (at .28 apiece), but I assured her that I was writing a story about concrete. They didn't mind my taking pictures when I told them they'd be famous on the internet in the US.