getting an eye opener

16 May 2008

Yesterday I was moved to another project – remodeling a “pharmacy”. Myself and two other Seabees were tasked with painting it inside and out, replacing four windows and a door, and building two sets of shelves for medication. The pharmacy is only about 50 square feet and barely has room for all three of us inside at the same time. We spent most of the day yesterday preparing the building by pressure washing it and scrubbing it. We had a hard time getting the pressure washer going. The only water source in town is a set of spigots by the town well, yes THE town well. We had to take a piece of hose and jam it over the end of the spigot and then jam the hose into our American hose which we then connected to the washer. There were already a bunch of the villagers out there watching us when we started, but they came out of the woodwork when we fired up the pressure washer. For the most part, the locals aren’t too impressed by out tools, a hammer may be nicer than another hammer, but it is still a hammer. The one thing that they are fascinated by is our power tools. Once we got the building squared away, we spent the rest of the day painting the outside in front of another huge crowd. Paint isn’t unheard of here, but it is fairly uncommon. Most of the buildings are made of unpainted block and stucco, while the majority of the homes are for lack of a better word, shanties. They are made of pieces and parts of all manner of things, old signs, pieces of plywood, corrugated metal, and of course bamboo and palm fronds.
Today we finished painting the inside of the building and second coated the outside. We again drew a huge crowd when we pulled out another of our mysterious wonders, a circular saw. One of the Philippino Seabees that we are working with stated that he had never run one, let alone seen one. The village was just amazed at how fast we were able to cut the plywood and pieces for the sides of the shelves. The villagers are extremely friendly, most of the men are gone during the day out working in the rice paddies, picking cutting and drying the rice. They put the rice on the side of the road because it’s hot and then sweep it up into sacks and cart it off. Almost none of the houses have electricity and none that I have seen have any type of running water. Everyone has big plastic jugs that they bring to the well pump to fill up. Some of the houses with electricity have televisions, you can tell which ones by the huge bamboo poles with rabbit ears on top in the yards and by the crowd of kids standing in the window to watch. We should be done there on Monday, and off to the next job.