Sifting Sands

Today was another lesson in patience and the reality of taking simple conveniences for granted. I offered to help Stephanie with the construction of a concrete water filter that she's been working on for some time. In fact, she's already made a few but wants to experiment to find the perfect balance between performance and cost. Hence, we were to mix several different combinations of varying size stones and sand from the river, the ocean and the volcanoes to achieve the strongest and cheapest concrete. Of course, in the States, this would have been a simple matter of ordering various size aggregates and various consistencies of sand and mixing it up in a cement mixer. Of course, in Bluefields, nothing is quite that simple.

Despite our low expectations, we arrived at the shop to find all the raw materials already laid out for us. However, raw materials is definitely the right description. Basically, we had bags full of whatever the boys who dive to the bottom of the river or ocean had scooped up in their buckets and sold to us. Hence, in order to have pure sand or stones of similar size, we had to sift the raw sand by hand. We started by simply shoveling piles onto our sifting screens and quickly realized we would be there all night if we didn't find a faster method. So, looking around the shop I noticed a set of hooks suspended from the ceiling. Thinking this could speed things up a bit, we commenced tying the various size screens up with space between so we could pour through the top and sift out everything at once. It was a little make shift, but it worked! That only left pouring our separated sands into buckets of water so the sticks, shells, leaves and other organic matter would float to the top where the 10 year old boy who had followed us to the shop would happily retrieve it all and toss it out on the grass.

We didn't quite get around to actually pouring the cement, but at least we've got the right size rocks all laid out together and the steel mold cleaned up and ready for a saturday afternoon mud mixing party.