acceleration

after a 2am night and 5:30am morning finishing the shuttering, tom and i headed for the cement and concrete institute in midrand to pour our concrete. we had arranged the session with mathews, their education facilitator. he had obliged and agreed to supply us with concrete and a set accelerator as we had to strike the moulds in two days!

the cnci workshop was surprisingly sterile and clean and organized. mathews seemed very knowledgeable and advised us on a 3:3:1 mix. it seemed too dry but tom assured me it wasn’t.
the work was physical and heavy. my knuckles were battered from last night’s shuttering assembly. the cuts were raw and scabs struggled to latch on as i scooped aggregate, sand and cement into buckets. we worked hard and fast in order to get back to kwathema at an hour reasonable to complete some tasks.

after mixing 36 buckets of stone, 36 buckets of sand, 12 buckets of cement and 26.4 litres of water in 12 batches in the mixer, the moulds were filled. the vibrating table was rigorous and bucked like a rodeo bull. tom, mathews and another man transferred the 100+ kg moulds onto a trolley for relocation to the store.

we left the cnci just before lunch and raced back to kwathema.

i arrived to find much progress. white lines were being painted across the tar towards our trees, the concrete slabs were being primed, the tyre bollards had been completed, a fischer representative was on site chemical mortaring the abacus rods into the brickwork and a front-end loader was roaring across the adjacent site dumping rubbish into a tip truck. veli was completing the beam of names and was soon to move onto the donors logos. i was relieved that i had such a motivated and focused group.

children had begun to gather at the abacus and as soon as permissible, started a game of spin-the-block. they jumped and high-fived and shouted.

i slotted in by attempting to assemble the tyre fixings that had been delivered by fischer. fischer had been so reliable and accommodating and so unexpectedly generous. guy and i battled with alignment and gareth drilled the holes. hannah arrived and commented on the handrail. she said she quite liked the yellow colour of the steel primer. she said it was far more discrete than the red would be.

catherine started to black-out miller for veli to write our. it finally seemed that we were generating big developments.

we headed back to johannesburg satisfied after making such big strides.