Unfinished business

Construction here is pretty unrefined.  It’s not that it’s unsound; it just doesn’t have a finished feel like the US.  Many of the men who have gone on the construction trips with the church will be familiar with it.  It consists mainly of stacked cinder block with some rebar mixed in in places covered with plaster.  It goes pretty slow and is very manual.  I’ve only seen one real power tool the whole time I’ve been here and it was being used by a road crew.  They buy their cement and mix it with sand for mortar right on the job site.  It seems like almost everywhere you go there are the piles of sand and cement. 

The concept of “finished” work doesn’t exist in many places here.  If the outside of a building is painted, it’s a nice building and the people have a little money.  Many people never get to paint their houses.  That’s one of the things that can get a little bit depressing around here . . . so many gray houses, inside and out.  All cinder block gray.  It’s not too bad in certain parts of Tegucigalpa, but when you go to other parts especially out into the country a little bit, there are almost no finished or painted buildings.  People often build their house over a long period, buying materials as they are able.  I’ve seen houses with some cinder block walls and the rest is just basically a few wood panels or whatever they could find propped up.  They’ll build that part when they get some more money.  They may never get around to painting it.  It’s just a luxury that’s not necessary.

Once a building is plastered and painted though, as most businesses are, it can end up looking pretty nice like these below.  The yellow one is a private school.  The others are houses of fairly well off people.

Even on the inside, the concept of “finishing” doesn’t really apply.  There are so many things that would stand out as ugly in the US that are pretty normal here.  For example, here in our apartment, they have a couple of little wooden boxes right in the middle of the wall.  I wondered why such a weird thing would be right there.  When I pulled the front panels of the box open, I found some pipes there.  It’s almost like they don’t plan their construction.  They just start building and if in the middle of their building process, they need to put a pipe somewhere, they just do it and “Oh, we’ll just build a box to go around it.”  The unsightliness of it is unimportant.  It works.  Other pictures below ugly construction on the inside.

They save everything possible from construction though.  When we were moving the Bible school, there was a room full of construction materials that they had saved from the old site.  The people who bought the old building were going to tear it down.  So we took out all the doors, windows, light fixtures, etc, and saved them for the next building.  There in one corner of the room was a stack of doors and thresholds.  Expensive stuff.  Being able to save it was important.