YAO JIN VILLAGE, China – Having spent most of my life in the contracting and construction business, I am all too aware of the countless factors that can upset the “best laid plans of mice and men.” There are many moving parts in a construction project, and any one of them can delay progress of an entire job. Thursday started out looking like “one of those days.”

About 5 a.m., I heard rain hammering on my hotel window. I cringed, and prayed that it was only a shower that would not turn our site into a muddy quagmire. Then, about an hour later, I got a call saying that one of the trucks transporting our crane broke down during the night and that the four vehicle convoy had to pull off the road and wait for repairs.

The rain didn’t last long, so the site was only slightly muddy when we arrived under cloudy skies. The steep mountains behind the village were shrouded in fog, and the fragrance of wood smoke from village cooking fires reminded of a Michigan morning. A crew was busy with final placing of steel forms and trimming final grades for building #1.

The reason we need the crane is that we are mixing all of the concrete on site, and need the crane with its long boom to “skip” loads of wet mix to the various building foundation sites. On a job this big in the United States, pre-mixed concrete would be delivered in ready mix trucks. That is not an option here. The cost of delivering the 1800 cubic meters of premixed concrete to our remote location would break the bank. Instead, we will provide jobs for locals by mixing over 900 tons of bagged cement with thousands of tons of sand and gravel, and use the crane to place it where we need it.

About 3 p.m. the crane convoy finally arrived, and, after squeezing under low wires at the village entrance, began the assembly process. The crane crew worked fast, but we soon ran out of daylight. I stayed until dark and watched the last vertical section lifted and bolted into place.

The crane erection crew promised they would work into the night to install the horizontal boom and cables so that the crane would be ready in the morning. Now…if only it doesn’t rain, we can start the long-awaited concrete pour tomorrow morning.

As we drove off the job site, there were still around 25 village women working with picks and shovels tweaking the final grading for building #3 foundations. It continues to amaze me how hard these villagers work. There was an elderly grandmother crouching by the side of the excavation holding her infant granddaughter, watching the women work. I saw that as an example of how work ethic is instilled in a child and passed down through the generations. It was that way in my family when I was growing up, but I don’t think it common in our high-tech culture today. I wonder if simple villagers in the mountains of China know more about training children than we do in America.

Tags: Asia, Bill Horan, China, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, OBI, Operation Blessing, Rebuild, Sichuan, Sichuan Earthquake, Yao Jin

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