Digging

If any form of digging where in the Olympics Papua New Guinea would bring home the gold every year. And as long as it was a summer sport they just might have a few medal sweeps (I don't think a PNG native would handle the winter to well).

Before we arrived in PNG I considered myself to be pretty handy with a shovel, spade, or any digging utensil. But digging next to a national, I feel like a one armed third grader. Using a spade is simply part of any Papua New Guinean's lifestyle. They are particularly good at digging what they call a barret, which is a square ditch to drain water from a garden, house, or anywhere you don't want excess water. When I say square ditch I mean square. There is great pride in digging a barret with strait sides and a flat bottom.

The picture above is from a project I started a few weeks ago. The hole is for the footing of a small building to house a new generator for the station (CAT Gen Set, all the way from Illinois). Before the ditch filled with rain water I took my framing square and set it on the bottom corner of the hole. Though I was impressed, I was not surprised to find that the ditch was perfectly square all the way around the 7meter by 6meter building. Just to humor them I took the level and checked several points in the ditch to find that the bottom was perfectly level (amazing since the only tool they had was a spade).

Normally the hole would have been dug by our backhoe, but since it is out of commission it had to be dug by hand. To my surprise it only took two days and three guys to dig out for the footings.

Whenever I am supervising a project I try to "get in there" and do the work with them as much as I can. But when it comes to any form of digging I just get out the way so I don't embarrass myself.