Working on a Building

Construction projects, Country and City

COUNTRY
What looks like a rocky hillside is being leveled to create a new set of rooms for the home of Alicia and Santiago, out toward the south end of Taquile Island, the Huallano sector. The men are chipping the high spots and will fill the low ones. These rooms may sometimes be used to house tourists who overflow from the more touristic enterprise you see in the background of this first picture.

Silvano and Santiago chip rocks as little Bryan looks on.

A natural watercourse flows through this site during heavy rains. The design plan is to leave it as a tunnel under the floor.
 Rebar is cut and bent to make the parts we need:

Check out the rebar hand-made saw.

These rectangles are tied to uprights for cement strength.

Sam and Delfin tie rebar together.

A Pick-hoe served as my tool to dig out the weeds. Quack grass was introduced into Taquile only a few years ago and has come to dominate the grasses. In some places here its roots simply formed along the rocks, in other places it found a crack and held tight. I don't fool myself that I got it all, but maybe it won't be able to pierce the cement floor which is to come.

Tara digs out the plant material.

The first stage for cement forms is installed.

The work goes on, and I may add to this post or create another as this house progresses. I write this post from Puno, which is necessary since my phone doesn't let me post.

CITY

Just across from our hotel in Puno, the Hostal los Uros on Teodoro Valcarcel near the Mercado Central, a project of building a new school building is in progress. This project is under a tight deadline, as school starts in early March.

When we arrived in Puno on January 10, this is what we saw: 

Just starting

 Two weeks later, the crew worked well into the night (maybe all night) and on January 25 all the forms are ready and a huge crew is pouring the second story floor:

Of course, no one is wearing masks, and only some have gloves or hardhats.

big crew works hard

The street was closed in the middle just past our hotel all day. By evening it was all cleaned up and the next morning big piles of bricks ready for the next step.

I'll post more about this as well when we return to Puno in a couple of weeks.