Cement, Cement, Cement

Making cement the Cambodian way

Today was a much better day than yesterday.Yesterday our van got stuck in the mud less than 50 feet from the entrance to the orphan home. We got the 2 ton truck from the orphan home to pull the van out of the mud and the road sunk under the truck and it got stuck. Good news is that we were close to the orphan home. The bad news was that the road was blocked and could not get any building materials delivered. After 4 hours of digging in the mud and trying to make chains for the truck out of rope and cut tree branches we found an over sized jeep from town to come help. The tow cable broke about three times but we were able to get both vehicles out. Praise God. Needless to say there was not a lot of work that got done in the morning. The afternoon was a blur. We put fence post forms in place over re-bar and made cement. We working until 6:30 pm. Which is about an hour to 90 minutes past our normal time. We went straight to dinner with dirty, muddy, cement covered clothes and bodies. There was not much talking at dinner. We wolfed down our food. Everyone was starving from the  flurry of work in the afternoon.
We were able to get the rest of the re-bar set for the fence forms and we got about 17 fence posts in place. This may seem easy, but we made forms and are pouring cement into the forms and creating our own cement fence posts. They are better than wood and much better than the prefab ones that you buy here. They are thicker and hold the chain link fence better than the others. This takes much more work and much more cement.
To make cement you start with seven, 5 gallon buckets of sand. You lug a 50 kg (110 pounds) bag of cement and place on sand. Mix these two together with shovels. You then add to that five, 5 gallon buckets of gravel. The you add water and mix until ready to carry by buckets to the fence posts around the property. This is all mixed right on the ground. No wheel barrels, no cement mixer and no quickrete cement that you just add water to. Today we made about 10-12 sets of this mixture. Tomorrow we hope to make at least 15 sets. That is 1500 pounds of just the cement, This doesn't include sand or gravel. Wow. I am getting tired thinking about it. I better head off to bed. Pray for us. Pray for God's continued strength and provision. Christ is King!