An Inside Look: Pouring the floor at Genesis

The other day I went over to the Genesis spinning plant to help them pour the concrete for their floor. I knew this was tough work, intellectually. But now while my arms and back and legs are still aching, let me give you an idea of how hard it really is.

It’s done by hand. Yes, they are pouring the floor – an area of more than 15,000 square feet – by hand. They have divided their floor up into 84 sections, and pour three to four sections each morning. Each section takes around 20 bags of cement, 40 buckets of water, 40 buckets of gravel and 60 buckets of sand. It takes them about an hour to pour each section, and they cannot stop – once they start pouring they have to keep going for three or four hours. Once they have finished pouring they eat lunch – these days they often make a big soup for everybody so they can be sure folks have at least one good meal when working so hard. After lunch, they rake sand, lay metal reinforcement and wire it to its supports and put forms in place to ready the floor for the next morning’s concrete pouring.

Here are the players:

Natalia & Petronila shovel gravel into buckets – four buckets for each load of cement – and lift them onto a cart, which they wheel over to the cement mixer.

Martha, María & Chilo shovel sand into buckets – six buckets for each load of cement – and lift them onto a cart, which they wheel over to the cement mixer. I did that job the other day with Ramona, tiny woman in her 50s who is now on doctor’s rest with an inflamed shoulder from the day I worked with her.

Ervin, Geovanny & Pablo work the cement mixer – pouring buckets of water, gravel, sand and dumping two 50 lb bags of cement into the mixer for each load. All of this has to be lifted above shoulder height into the mixer and these guys can’t stop…they lift for three to four hours without a break. Ervin & Geovanny are young guys – the only two members of the co-op without kids – but they are worn out. Watching them was the first time I have seen young strong Nicaraguan men visibly wavering under physical strain. They work hard, but the women can’t do this job because they don’t have the upper body strength. Pablo – a diabetic who is just back from several weeks on sick leave when he was in serious danger of losing his foot to infection – runs the mixer, controlling the heavy head of the machine as it fills the wheelbarrows with concrete.

Sara, Mercedes, Janneth, Xiomara, & Rosa cart concrete – they fill wheelbarrows with concrete and wheel them over to the section being poured, up a board and dump them into place, all without letting it dump over before its destination. These women are all moms in their 30s and 40s, strong women with lots of responsibilities.

The four hired masons level off the concrete as it goes in each section, and then spend all afternoon working on putting the fine finish layer on each section.

These folks have been working like this 5 days a week for 7 weeks. Can you imagine? They will be finished by the end of October…they will be beyond exhaustion by then, but you can bet they won’t be too tired to celebrate! – Becca