Haiti, Friday March 28: the Portland Pulley

After spending the morning at the hospital, we returned to the school grounds in time for lunch. Even though we were just about to go out to work in the hot Caribbean sun after lunch, we all had to shower as soon as we got back. The kids had pooped, peed, and sweated on us, and a good scrubbing was in order.

After lunch we headed out to work on our main project: improving a rooftop garden. This rooftop was on the top of the chapel building, 4 flights up. We started it on Thursday, and left off at the point where we had all the dirt at the base of 4 flights of stairs and were seriously facing the prospect of carrying the dirt up -- a bucketful at at time -- in 5 gallon buckets. When we had some idle time waiting for the planter bed walls to be built (brick & mortar), the 3 "liberal arts majors" in the group decided to devise a better (read: easier!) way to get the dirt up to the roof. Father Richard had the idea of creating a pulley, so the priest, the second grade teacher, and the project manager set out to do exactly that. (I know, it sounds like the the start of a bad joke...)

Three iterations later, we had a first-rate pulley that did the job of hauling several yards of dirt up to the rooftop garden. We went scrounging in the scrap depot and tool depot to find useful supplies for the project. The final design included an old wheelbarrow wheel that we cut the rubber tire off of. The resulting rim was a nice, strong, smooth channel for the pulley rope to run in. We found a pipe just the right size for the wheel to turn on, and used a vise grip to keep the wheel from moving off the end of the pipe. The top of the wall fortunately had some rebar sticking up and we were able to fasten the whole contraption there. Jack, the engineer in the group, consulted with us on overall design and also fashioned a first-rate hook from some scrap metal that we hung the buckets on as we pulled them up. (It was funny, everyone kept trying to give Jack credit for inventing the pulley...)

At one point we had 8 people working the pulley operation -- 2 to shovel dirt into buckets at the bottom, 1 to hook buckets on the pulley, 1 to work the pulley rope, 1 to unhook the buckets from the rope at top of pulley, and 3 to shuttle buckets up the last half-flight of stairs to the roof. This made quick work of moving the dirt pile. It took us the rest of Friday and much of Saturday to finish off the garden project.

All in all, I would say the pulley was a big success -- and far preferable to carrying individual buckets up to the roof. We dubbed our invention the "Portland Pulley."