‘People’

Our finca is in a very rural and remote area and usually there is very little crime here. We are still living in the town a half hour drive away from the farm whilst a local builder completes our house. When he finishes work in the evening, he leaves his tools laying around outside, and they are still there the next morning. Similarly we have piles of building material out in the open, close to the road and nothing has gone missing.

The other night, at about 10 pm, a neighbour was sitting out on his porch when he saw a car drive down the earth road that leads past our farm. A few hundred meters away from our entrance the car turned off its lights. Shortly afterwards the neighbour saw what he thought was a lantern or torch moving about by our house.

So he went inside, picked up his rifle, and walked down one of his fields to investigate. As he neared our farm he could see an unfamiliar car in our farm entrance as well as someone with a torch by or in the house.

Carefully taking aim with his rifle, he fired three shots at the car.
The torch went out, there was a short pause, then the car reversed out of the entrance and tore up the road like a scalded cat, only putting on its lights as it reached the public road 1 km away.

Crime prevented, job done.

We are about to start house building on the farm but have a problem as the irrigation water will be cut off for at least 2 months.  As the builder will need a huge amount of water for the concrete and brickwork he has to do we decided to rejuvenate an old ‘pileta’ or underground storage tank that we have close to the building site.

Digging out the old water storage tank

The tank is about 2m by 2m by 2m and was partially full of earth and rubbish. In the past it had one of its walls knocked in to provide a slope for cattle to use to walk down for a drink.
We have never done any work like this, but we had one week to dig out the rubbish, rebuild 1 underground wall, carry out cement repairs and line the whole with a cement based plaster.

In the trench, behind the spade, is an old cement floor from an earlier house

A trench was dug connecting the pileta with an irrigation ditch and a PVC pipe laid in it with a filter to keep out leaves etc. Whilst digging the trench and (later) the house footings we came across old cement floors and footings and coloured chunks of plaster indicating yet another house once stood here. More of that in a future post.

When the pileta was completed we painted it in swimming pool paint to help keep it leak tight.

Any colour as long as it is blue

The paint should have had 5 days to dry, but all it received was 3 days as we filled it with some irrigation water for a farm further downstream, 1 day before it was cut off for the whole area. Our work was OK as the pileta did not leak at all.

No sooner had the pileta been filled, then  it was emptied by the builder! He had built a bund around where the house was to go and filled it with nearly 6000 litres of water to help compress the earth before digging footings.  And to make matters worse – he wanted anoher 6000 litres to further compress it.

Water is pumped onto the site to compress the earth

We were saved by the local shop owner who has a well and a pump. He very kindly allowed us to fill our empty 220 litre oil drums with water to replenish the pileta. And with 4 drums on the back of the pick up (880 litres) at a go, that was a lot of trips.

The local municipality were great too and their water tanker dropped off a few thousand litres when they could spare it. Thanks to both those people we were now able to start and continue building.

But before we could build anything we needed steel, sand, gravel and bricks to be delivered to the site.

I filled the irrigation supply ditch for our neighbour with earth, stones and logs so that heavy traffic could access our work site on the promise that it would all be cleared away before irrigation started again.

Temporary access bridge for lorries

Tuesday 10th May was the first day of some frantic activity.

The site for the house

The 3 point linkage did not fit our tractor.

The new farm entrance looking from the road

Overflowing irrigation ditch added to the 'interest'

Site levelling in progress

Stuck in the flooded new entrance

Everyone busy working before dusk falls

Measuring up for the initial stakes to go in.