Moments: Construction

October 20, 2010

It sounds like a jackhammer is about to take out my apartment. The walls and windows shake. I feel the vibrations as I sit in my chair. A grating, never-ending hammering – I woke up to it at midnight last night.

Now that I’ve looked out my window I see it’s not a jackhammer, but an excavator machine. I only know the name because I just looked for it on Google. I wonder if Peter Hall will be shaken into a collapse.

The excessive hammering is the construction of housing for the foreign teachers who have children. The site’s lights stay on late at night and brighten my room even if my curtains are closed. Almost every time I open the curtains, there is a new scene to observe. One day I saw a giant ditch in which four or five women in visor hats shoveled debris onto the bed of a front loader. Above ground, men were shoveling some kind of white powder – ash, maybe? Cement? The stuff filled the air. It swirled above the workers like columns of steam. The next day I saw the ditch was being filled. It slowly grew shallow. With each new layer of dirt, a road roller drove up and down the ditch, setting my radiator to shaking again. A few teachers sat in my living room on Sunday and couldn’t hear a sermon podcast over the din. As I look out now, I can’t quite tell if the workers are constructing, or still removing remnants of the demolished dining hall.

October 27, 2010

The construction site outside my window is mostly level now. The ditch is filled, and the dirt is smoothed into one flat rectangle. I’ve heard teachers say the building will have no foundation. I wait to see if this is true.