Building a Community Center in Ghana

With my bum toe (which still bleeds at times and doesn’t fit into my tennis hoe) it has been pretty hard to find jobs I can do at the work site. However, screeding seems like something right up my alley.

All of our walls have to be covered in a concrete mix. I imagine the coating is used to protect the structural integrity of the blocks, but just because I use phrases like “structural integrity” doesn’t mean I really know what I am talking about. Nonetheless, all the rest of the buildings in Ghana also seem to be covered in the stuff.

The mix looks like tick gray cake batter sitting in the head pans (did I mention we are really missing cake here in Ghana?). Using the trowels you take big scoops of the mix and, starting at the bottom, you toss/slap it against the wall. As soon as it lands on the wall you quickly spread it out so it is about an inch thick. While this might seem like you are just icing a giant cake (like I said, really missing cake), it is actually really difficult at first. It seems like every time you slap it against the wall, most of it just plops onto the floor and you spend all your time scooping it off the ground. Or even worse, you spread the stuff all over the wall and feel really good about your work. Then out of nowhere, like a slow, devastating landslide, you watch helplessly as it slides off in one gray concrete avalanche. Desperately you try to keep it in place, but with all of your efforts it only makes the stuff fall off faster.

As you might expect the Ghanaians are able to slap it up no problem.

To add a decorative element to the building, the students had the idea of having the school children put their handprints into the freshly covered walls. When the idea was explained to the workers they seemed to understand. After the students had completed the first section and were moving onto another, one of the workers came over an started smoothing over the fresh little hand prints. Needless to say, it took a little more explaining and in the end the workers agreed to not cover the prints. They probably think we are crazy for messing up the nice smooth screeding!

All along one side and under the windows the children from the different classrooms waited in the “lines” to get a chance to place their hands on the walls. More than once children would come back two or three times. Each time we would ask, “haven’t you already done it?” Looking innocently up at us, they would smile and shake their heads no.

In addition to the children’s’ hands we Miamians and the workers also placed our handprints in the wall.

The incorporation of the handprints I think will be my favorite aspect of the building. It reminds me of the projects you do when you are little, when you capture your baby hand in plaster of paris or clay and you parents bring it out when you graduate to remind you of how little you were once. I hope the children will come back after they are grown and remember what it was like to be young.