The Beauty of a Bucket Line

Day 4 (continued) - Friday, December 2, 2011

After spending the morning helping with Picture Day at another school (see previous entry), we returned to the worksite to continue our work on building the new school. The first task involved pouring concrete to build a roof across the walkway from the main school building to the bathroom building.

The roof was to be made of concrete. The border of the roof is 24 inches deep and 8 inches wide. The roof itself was about 4 feet wide and about six inches deep. The entire roof had to be poured. There was no concrete truck, no truck to pump the concrete. There was only bags of concrete, pile of sand and gravel, buckets and a hand mixer.

The concrete was mixed by hand and shoveled into buckets. The buckets were handed from one person to another along the line and then up a platform and then onto the roof. On the roof, the buckets were passed along to me where I poured the buckets out into the forms. It took over 1,500 buckets of hand-mixed buckets of concrete to finish the roof. It was the hardest physical work I have ever been engaged in. By the end, it was hard to stand up straight and I was very tired, but I was also struck by the beauty of the bucket line.

We had worked in lines throughout the week, moving tiles from one room to another and moving concrete blocks from pile to another pile. Working in a line, passing along construction materials gives you the opportunity to get to now the people next to you. You have the opportunity to laugh and sing. In our bucket line of concrete, I heard people ask each other if they were OK. I saw them take special care to pass the bucket with the handle in the exact position the next person wanted. Care for you neighbor was not just a maxim, it was being lived out in tiny moments up and down the bucket line.

Countless children will walk under that overhang, never knowing how much work it required. I do hope though, that as they walk under the walkway, they feel the joy that went into the construction. I can only describe that line of concrete bucket passers as beautiful.