JCK-at-large SITE

During three days of Covid-quarantine in Addis Ababa, our only relief from the hotel room was the balcony.  Fortunately, we were looking down at a very interesting hive of industry, an excavated construction site, where some seventy-five workers were busy as bees, putting together underground parking and the entrance level for a new hotel.  No coronavirus over there!   

We had thirty workers in red hard hats off to our right, constructing the underground parking on the lowest level.  Then, up a level to our left, we had some thirty guys in yellow hard hats who spent their time receiving and disconnecting loads from the cranes, and steering them into the right place on the ground. Hods of cement and bundles of steel rods swung out on cables over the big trucks on a side street and were then eased into place at various stations. The yellow hats were laying out an expanding floor covering, tough black sheets which went down with a thud on steel joists.  

Then we had the white hat men, some six or seven, who showed up in different locations throughout the day, checking on the labour force, always with a sheaf of white papers in hand, which looked like “the plan.” Not to be missed were the wide brimmed Chinese straw hats, also in circulation around the site, often carrying the plans.  And a gun! 

Boom! Out from under one straw hat came a deafening shot, like a cannon! It sounded like the start of a relay race! A great chorus of cheers, yips and whistles rose up from all over the site.  But this was just the final call to get back to work!  Lunch hour was over.  Apparently some workers had been taking their time getting back on the job.

Oh, it was a very entertaining site.  Full of bustling activity all day.  Without it, our three days of quarantine would have seemed interminable.  Three huge cranes towering over the construction site, keeping things moving along with their unbroken supply line — how many man-hours they must have saved!   

But how did their operators get up there to their control cab, we wondered, well above the height of our balcony? We kept an eye on the cranes during the first day, looking for some kind elevation device.  It looked dangerous. Then at lunch the next day, we got our answer.  Running up the one hundred-rung ladder came our crane operator, like a chameleon scooting up a palm tree!  Hand over hand, climbing so fast it looked like he was on a pulley — this was his daily work-out!

One day someone was disciplined by his fellow workers.  All thirty of the lower level, red-helmets mobbed a man with a rumble of threats and a scuffle.  The victim was accosted by one or two at first, who were pushing and confronting him.  Then he was just swallowed up in the crowd, everyone milling and shoving trying to get a piece of him.  Hearing the ruckus, every worker on the entire site dropped what they were doing and rushed over to see the melée, including the yellow hats one level up who clustered at a railing to look on. When he finally emerged from the crowd he was dressed all in black with no sign of a uniform or a helmet.  It looked like he had been “stripped” of his duties — by his own colleagues!  Maybe it was theft. We figured he had broken some kind of union code and the workers themselves were applying the discipline. It was a lynching that stopped just short!  

A blast on a horn signalled lunch!  In two minutes the whole site had emptied out, everyone making their way up one of the two wide staircases on the sides of the site, which took them up to the modular buildings on street level which obviously housed the kitchen and the offices. 

Concrete and steel, barrels, trusses and forms — it was a massive project, covering half a city block, with never an idle moment.  It seemed to us to be quite the adventure, with all those crushing loads swinging around on cranes.  And such an example of strength in unity!  So much life pulsated over the project!  Such passion from the worksite!  Just to be part of a team of builders, constructing a great edifice in the heart of a great city!

Meanwhile, we were standing by, on our third-storey balcony, practising our safe social distancing.  It just seemed unfair.  To be in quarantined isolation, disconnected, monitoring progress — we were like distant inspectors.  We could probably have picked out any slackers and reported them.  But how come Corona social distance only applied to our side of the street?

I found myself half wishing that I could claim a hard hat and join the project!  Even a yellow one would do — just to be part of that tumultuous human enterprise. There was something about the energy of that worksite that said, “We’re alive!  The virus has not conquered!”  You picked up all that virility and ingenuity.  In a world that had ground to a halt, this project was like a defiant statement about our human existence, our high calling to design and build. To be fully invested in a great enterprise, to supplement the best laid plans with our combined energy and skills — that’s what you wanted to be part of!

How irrepressible we are, we the people of the earth!  It’s as though the call of our Creator is deeply stamped upon our human DNA — “Be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it.”  As Anthony Hoekema puts it, “God has created us in his image so that we may carry out a task, fulfil a mission, pursue a calling.”  ”Subdue the earth!”  The Hebrew kabash literally means “to make the earth useful for human beings’ benefit and enjoyment.”

Nancy Pearcey says, “The first phrase ‘be fruitful and multiply,’ means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, ‘subdue the earth,’ means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, and compose music. This Cultural Mandate tells us that our original purpose was to create cultures, build civilizations—nothing less.

“The lesson of the Cultural Mandate is that our sense of fulfilment depends on engaging in creative, constructive work. The ideal human existence is not eternal leisure or an endless vacation—or even a monastic retreat into prayer and meditation—but creative effort expended for the glory of God and the benefit of others” (Total Truth).

I guess that’s why I felt like crossing the road.  It was about our “cultural mandate.” 

Or maybe it was just a wave of what Maya Angelou describes:

“We need Joy as we need air. We need Love as we need water. We need each other as we need the earth we share.”