Working Away the Rain

As you might know by now, I’m in Cherrapunjee (a.k.a. Sohra) in the far away land of North-East India, where butterflies and tribal people roam free all around, and where any good day is a day without 4 hours of continuous rain. Even so, if the rain doesn’t melt the last remaining thread of fabric from your clothes, the humidity – usually orbiting the 80% area – will probably get to you in ways unimaginable to anyone not born here.

When it’s raining, there’s one of two ways of spending time: counting heaps of money or engaging in the deep-rooted art of making children. Since none of the two is available to me right now, I desperately needed to find something else to fill my time. And that could only mean manual labor. I’ll grant you, usually it shouldn’t be the type labor that requires lots of space and/or proper tools to undertake it, but if there’s no other possibility, even that will do.

Confused? Well, let me explain: out here time is mostly spend inside. And if the inside is not big enough, one must find ways of making it bigger. That’s what we started out to do. Heprit, this great guy, who also happens to own the hostel I stay at in Lower Sohra and me decided to change things around here and make the common room/reception bigger.

Imagine a 4x4 meter room with a door and two windows on one side. Now imagine that as soon as you step in, you are confronted with either going to the right and virtually walking into a DVD rental place, or striding to the left and thus landing in the hostel’s reception. These areas are partly divided by a plywood wall right in front of the door, leaving about a meter in front of that for people to decide which way to go. We agreed that the best (and only) way to make a bigger reception where people could also hang out would understandably be to shrink the DVD rental. Also, in order to give the people some intimacy from the inquisitive eyes of the locals, Heprit, who also happens to own the DVD rental place, and me decided that the best place to expand would be behind the DVD rental.

Our planning summed up no more than one full day of steady work. But as my mother taught me, to get to the real amount of time any construction work takes, you’ll have to multiply what you planned by three and then hope for the best. Still, our minds were racing towards the end of this prodigious effort and didn’t even bother to think that it might just possibly take a little longer, considering the fact that we started at 2PM. After taking down all the DVDs displayed on the shelves and the shelves themselves, we intended to move the back plywood wall about halfway towards the front. But for this to happen, we had to first fix the shelves so that the plywood could be secured onto something. Well, by the end of the day, half of the shelves were in place.

On the second morning, we realized that if we put all the shelves up, there’d be no way of getting out from the back of the DVD rental, because we hadn’t cut through the wall towards the common room. So we started on chopping the dividing wall so that we’d have access on all sides.

Fixing the back plywood proved a bit tricky, as we couldn’t see where to nail it to the shelves from the back side so, on a closer look, you might see a small assemblage of tiny holes (and only imagine the thunderous diatribes we uttered every time we hit nothing on the other side). Still, on the third day, all the DVDs were dusted and put back into place.

The back room is still not ready; we came to an abrupt halt because we are not sure how to go on and what exactly to do back there. But in the meantime, friends come and help out with difficult tasks, such as applying the varnish, being fully, professionally equipped:

There are other projects filling my time. For instance, the 3-day disco ball made of old CDs or the new sign from outside the hostel, complying with Heprit’s requests and fashion sense, so I have yet to be bored.

Before

After

If it ever rains and you find yourself with nothing better to do than change the size of your DVD rental place or brake some scissors while trying to cut through old CDs, feel free to give me a shout and I’ll walk you through any of these projects free of charge and with accurate time spending information. After all, you know what they say: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try a bigger hammer’. Alternatively, 'If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you ever tried'.