Friday, December 23, 2016

The Carpenter I never was, but always wanted to be


12/23/2016

The past 3 weeks I’ve been slowly working on making my house my home. My roommate, Curtis, has been living in Namuno for one year now and has one year left in his Peace Corps service. On my first day in our house, Curtis offered to take his decorations out of the main living room so that we could decorate together! Needless to say, I told him the living room was just fine (he has a US flag and a few sports flag around the room along with some local decorations). For the past year Curtis has been living in Namuno alone so he was using one bedroom as his and the other to store sport, workout, and game equipment. He cleared out the second bedroom prior to my moving in. Additionally, he was using bookshelves/a dresser as kitchen shelves but let me use it once I moved in.

And starting on day 2 in my site began the building. Since all our kitchen supplies were on the ground, I began by building kitchen shelves. Using leftover bamboo and tire from the market I built the shelves you can see below! My town sells tire that has been cut up to various sizes and thicknesses so I used tire-rope to lash the bamboo together. Fortunately, growing up I had various opportunities to learn how to lash wood together to build structures. One summer I spent an entire week with a friend (shout out to John Barth) just building things out of rope and wood and learning about knots! In the past I have built a trebuchet along with some other random stuff. After a few trips to my market’s hardware stores and a few days, my kitchen shelves were complete! Next step was to work on unpacking my bags and setting up my room.

Up until Wednesday night of this week (two days ago), I had been sleeping on a thick sleeping bad on the ground. No bed and no mattress upon my arrival to site. Peace Corps gave me clearance to buy a bedframe and mattress for reimbursement, so I went out and bought a mattress. Unfortunately, my town only sells bedframes for queen mattresses and I bought a twin so that it would fit better in my room. I had two choices, build my own bedframe or go to Montepuez, buy one, and pay to have someone bring it to Namuno or just build my own! I’ve always wanted to learn more about carpentry so I made the only logical choice – build my own bedframe! Up in the north we call them Makua beds because the southern parts of Mozambique don’t build them. They’re made from wood with a reed-rope weaving for the bed part.

I began watching YouTube videos about joint making with wood, continued to frequent the market for tools, and began buying wood and reed-rope. My town has some lumber but it’s extremely expensive: a 2x4 can sell for 150-200 Meticals. Comparatively, a log of about the same size or smaller costs 30 Meticals.  Step 1: debark the wood. It’s hot and tiring but oddly fun to debark wood with a machete. Step 2: Measure, Measure, Measure once more and then make cuts with my handsaw. Step 3: Sand down the legs and attempt to make them more level. Cuts with a handsaw and without any workbench or table make it more difficult to have level cuts – especially when you’re a beginner carpenter. Step 4: Measure and begin the Mortise and Tenon joints. These joints are some of the strongest but each one would take me 60 to 90 minutes to build the Mortise and another hour to build the tenon – there were 8 of these joints in total. By this time, I had about 8 blisters on my right hand. Most had broken and half of those either had blood blisters or another blister forming underneath. On day 7 of construction, I begin the reed-rope weave. I’m about 75% done with the weave when I realize one of the tenons has strong signs of degradation. It was a joint I rushed and only spent 30 minutes fitting the tenon to its mortise hole. Frustrated and tired of sleeping on the floor I began the process of thinking about potential solutions. I tried to fix the joint and continued the weave. Shortly thereafter, the entire joint broke.

I did the one thing sports has trained me to do – I took a deep sigh, went outside, and began debarking another tree to replace my broken piece. I bought a few hourly data packets and played my YouTube pump up playlist I usually listen to while working out. In my rage, my machete slips and cuts threw the glove I was using. Hilariously, I cut my left thumb (I’m fine now) right above where I cut my thumb growing up! I have a large scar on the inside of my left thumb from some carpentry I attempted to do in Middle School. I was using a chisel and it slipped – the result being my scar. I could only help but laugh at my hand full of blood. Damn, sometimes I’m straight stupid. Well, I did the only logical thing – took a shot of jack, cleaned my gash, taped it up and finished debarking (fortunately I had my machete sharpened the day before so it was perfectly sharp so the cut was clean and easy to deal with. Unfortunately, my machete was sharp and cut a little too well). On day 9 I finally completed my bed. See the pics below! Materials used: logs about 2.5 inches in diameter and rope made from reed. Tools used: Machete, handsaw, pencil, ruler, 24 mm chisel, 18 mm chisel, and sandpaper.

My hope is to build another similar type bed to work as a couch for our living room. One of my joints is again showing some stress, but it should last at least a month or two. It just means I still have some work ahead of me! I also have a list of about 9 or 10 other things I would love to build for our house. School starts on January 20th so I have a bit of time until work begins. I’m also hoping to ask our carpenters if I could rent a power saw for an hour – that would definitely make things a bit easier!  

Until January 20th, I will continue to make my house my home. It is important to have a place of security and comfort. I am beyond excited to have unpacked my bags and put up my photos from home. I will also continue to practice my Portuguese and continue to learn a bit of Makua – vaccani vaccani.

~Daniel

“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children” – Confucius

P.S. Sometimes you need to plant rice, mango trees, and teach in the same year. In order to plan for hundred years you must live past the next year.

P.P.S. Some logistical information about mail! My new address is:

Daniel Bladow

P.O. Box 95

Pemba, Cabo Delgado

3200

Mozambique



Make sure you write “air mail” or “para aviao“ on any piece of mail. Also, if you’re sending a package here are some tips: when you list the items inside and the value of those items, please understate the value. The higher the value, the more I must pay to receive the package. As far as packaging, the most effective methods I have heard about are: use a cardboard box of some kind (think shoe box or any other box), put the box in a trash bag, and then wrap it with brown packaging paper. This tends to prevent spills when it tears and prevents people from stealing. Lastly, if you address the package as Padre Daniel or something like Para Cristo then it is less likely that people attempt to open the package and steal things.

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