the well

Previously, toward the end of the overly long post softly spoken magic spells, I mentioned the existence of an old well. A man had cleaned the well of trash that had built up in the bottom over many decades of disuse.


Once this was done, other men began the incredibly arduous process of digging until they hit water.




The soil here is two or three feet of rich black or red topsoil that looks like it was dumped out of bags of premium potting soil. Below this topsoil is white marl. White marl is a dense clay, a kind of decomposed limestone. It is heavy, mineral rich, dense, and wells dug through this are stable and do not collapse.

After the trash was removed from the well, various people suggested that it was important to build at least a small wall around the well so that rain would not wash mud back into it. My family and I gathered rocks for this wall, but building it would have to wait as mortar would be needed to cement the rocks together. To make mortar requires water, so the well had to be dug until it reached water, as there was at that point no source of water on the site.

The digging is done by hand. One man goes down into the well and digs with a mattock and fills a bucket which is hauled up by the other man, dumped and lowered back down again. The well is less than three feet wide.

Two men dug four more yards to the current depth of 10 yards or 30 feet. The price charged for this is US$20 a yard.

We were working elsewhere in the meadow when one man came and said they were finished. This was in the middle of the week, and they were prepared to wait until Saturday to get paid. It seemed unconscionable not to pay them immediately so I sent Rebecca in the car to get some money to pay them. Covered in white mud, they cheerfully counted their pay, signed the little book that I am required to keep for the Belize Social Security administration, and left.

Here is the ladder they made and used to get in and out of the well, and the sticks that made up the platform on which the man topside stood to haul the bucket up:





With water available at the site, mortar could be made. I purchased some sand and cement and my good friend, his son and his grandson chopped the dirt away from the top of the well to get to the marl surface and built a short wall around the well.







Later we will use the piles of white marl that were taken from the well to build a floor all around the well that slopes away from the wall. Also at some point I will build a wooden cover or something to keep dust and leaves out of the well. The wall might be made higher but for the time being, work on the well is finished.