Day 4 - Going Up!

The day started 30 minutes earlier again today as the boys attempted to make best use of the daylight, requiring a 7.30am departure.  Work began immediately that everyone arrived on site, with the various teams of boys dividing themselves up quickly and getting on with the tasks at hand. Everything appeared to be going very smoothly and there was a push to complete the floor by lunchtime; this was until the pile of gravel rapidly disappeared until finally the concreting had to stop at  9.30am. Another truckload was already on its way, bringing the total so far to 28 tonnes, but that didn’t for another hour, at which time the site went into overdrive again.

Whilst this final push was taking place a small team was taken to one side to be trained in the mysterious art of brick laying. This involved in the first instance installing to vertical guides to work from and then stringing a horizontal line across to ensure that the bricks remained level. The boys were quick learners and within minutes were laying the first line of bricks along the back wall of the building, nearest the chapel. The lunch break had to be delayed slightly until one of the concrete sections was completed, but this meant that four had been completed in the morning, a mammoth task, leaving only one more to go (gravel was once again in short supply though as the 7 tonnes delivered that morning had already been exhausted).

Fortunately it had been possible to arrange for the farm hands to collect some gravel over lunch and the team were able to lay that final slab of concrete upon their return. The boys mixing the concrete at the end were definitely showing signs of fatigue but everyone could congratulate themselves on a job well done; it was truly an extraordinary feat. I think it’s safe to say that many of the boys would gladly never mix another batch of concrete in their lives, although at least now they would know exactly what to do.

The brick layers made steady progress throughout the afternoon with four layers of the end completed by the end of the day. Now that the concrete laying has been completed the rest of the team can turn their hands to brick laying too so the building should really start to take shape over the next couple of days.