Construction/Deconstruction

In China labor is cheaper than materials. When a building is being torn down they bring in scores of workers with hammers and chisels and they will chisel the concrete off of every individual brick in the entire building so that they can reuse the bricks. Just recently the orphanage lost about 5,000 ft2 of building. The kindergarten lost about the same. That is a lot of bricks. As if that was not enough work, they even dig 3-4 ft. underground to get out those bricks (in China they don’t pour a concrete foundation and then lay brick on top of that, they dig a ditch about 3 feet deep and start building the brick wall there).

About four times each day I scratch my head and say, either to myself or to my wife, this is a straaaaaange place we are living in.

The good news is that all of the construction that needed to be done to facilitate the apartments and classrooms that were going to be lost happened before the destruction.

In this picture our old apartment was right in front of the cameraman.