Machine or manual labour

A weekend in August was a busy one for the members of Iglesia Dios de Amor as they worked on the church building. While they hauled fill into the sanctuary to raise the floor, we fixed the cement mixer. Freddy had borrowed the machine a couple of months earlier and we were under the impression that they had used the mixer for other parts of the building, but we were wrong. The machine had been sitting idle while the cement was mixed by hand because the mixer did not work. The problem was a small one --the spark plug was full of carbon.

It was 5 pm. and time to mix the cement. We were ready to use the machine but everything came to a halt. The man hired to supervise the building did not want to use the mixer; he wanted to mix the cement by hand. This would mean that all the dry materials would be mixed on the ground using shovels. Then water would be added and finally it would be lifted into the wheel barrows and carried to where it was needed. The helpers wanted to use the mixer – it was easier.

Finally, an agreement was made and we started mixing the cement. Although we were told that everything was ready, there was a mad scramble when the first load of cement was ready. And the mad scramble continued until the last load was poured. They were amazed at the speed at which the cement was being mixed.

We realized that the supervisor did not understand how to calculate how much sand, gravel and cement he should put in the cement mixer. He knew the ratios for mixing on the ground but was not able to convert those amounts into the smaller amounts used in the mixer. The men who handled the wheel barrows also could not understand how Jake was calculating the mix. “Sometimes he puts half sand and half gravel in it and other times he adds a bit more cement. We don’t know what he is doing.” They must have thought Jake was either a magician or was just guessing.

An hour later everything was finished. By 6:30 everyone headed home. Freddy told us that when we started mixing the supervisor said that it would take until the next day to mix with the machine. He could not believe that everything was done in one hour. I think that we will be ‘hired’ again when they want to cement the floor.