Wire work

Most of our work at Santa Maria Virgen today had to do with wire. Because the church is going to be a two-story building, it needs very strong foundations, and the way the foundations will be strengthened is by laying rebar cages lengthwise in the trenches and burying them in cement.

For those who don't know (and I wouldn't have known without coming on these trips) rebar cages are structures made with different lengths and widths of wire. The rebar itself is a long steel rod -- which I suppose qualifies as a very thick wire -- with a raised texture to give it grip. A rebar cage is made with four (sometimes six) long rods of rebar held together by square rings. The rings are made from somewhat thinner wire bent into the ring shape. And the rings are held onto the rebar with even thinner wire ties. Most of our team spent most of our day making these rebar cages.

There are several stages to rebar cages. The mid-size wire has to be bent into rings. To do that, there is a jig consisting of several nails driven partway into a thick wooden board. Cut lengths of wire are run into the jig and bent around the nails with a special bending wrench. Lee Beam applied herself assiduously to the bending of rings for much of the day, spelled at times by one of the Honduran workers who belong to the congregation. Each cage required 43 rings, and we made nine cages today -- that's a lot of bending of rings!

Once 43 rings are ready, the cage is assembled by taking four bars of rebar, laying them horizontally on a series of work struts, and marking them at regular intervals to show where the rings should go. Rings are threaded onto the rebars and spaced at the marks. Then the rings need to be tied to the rebar with thinner wire ties. This is handwork: wire is looped over ring and rebar in a figure-8 pattern and twisted together at the corner. It requires strong thumbs; and it strengthens thumbs that keep at it for awhile. I'm going to be a formidable text-messager after a few days of this! The hand-twisted ties are then twisted tighter, and the wire-ends are cut off, with a tool called a "nipper," leaving a tight fit of ring to rebar. When all the corners of one side are done, the entire cage must be flipped over on its support struts, and the twist-and-nip process repeated on the other side, until all four corners of every ring are tightly tied to a rebar length. Bending, tying, twisting, nipping -- then and only then is the rebar cage complete.

At the height of our work day we had two tying stations going, building two cages simultaneously, and we were moving like a well-oiled machine.

Or, not so much. We weren't always so organized. We ran out of rings from time to time. Not enough thin wire had been cut into ties every so often. Tying the figure-8 loop wasn't a motion to which our fingers were accustomed at first; some ties had to be redone. Nippers went missing and were rediscovered. A group working on one cage had to stop and help the other group carry a finished cage from its struts. Wrists unused to so much twisting began to hurt. Skin was scratched from reaching across sharp wire-ends. As the day warmed, we were not without our frustrations and impatiences. But we kept building cages, building cages and more cages, until we used up all the rebar and had accomplished more than we had realized.

That was our day of wire work.

In movies and theater, "wire work" refers to simulated flying: using a harness and wires to lift someone and move them around as if they were airborne. It's the sort of thing you see in stage productions of Peter Pan and on the sets of kung fu movies. Several times in this day of wire work I thought of that other use of the term, and thought to myself how little this rebar-tying resembled flying. I couldn't even indulge flights of fancy, the way one can when doing repetitive manual work: there were enough variations in the task that the mind had to stay engaged. It was very down-to-earth stuff, scratches and sore thumbs and waiting for more wire and all.

And yet, when the rebar was gone and our wire work was done for the day, and we got to take a look at how the foundations of the church building are coming into place, and knew that our rebar cages are part of what is making that foundation strong -- there was a moment when I felt a little lighter, when my step didn't come down on the ground quite so hard, when it seemed like I'd moved my qi even a little beyond the drag of gravity, when it felt like maybe happy thoughts could lift us higher than we knew. Building something up means rising above the drag of dissolution -- and that was what our wire work accomplished today.

And, on the way home, we passed the truck delivering more rebar to the work site. I think I know what Monday will have in store...