Water.
One bucket. Then sand. Then hardcore. Cement half a bag. More hardcore. More sand. Another bucket of water, this one added in a dash, a sprinkle, the kind of wrist movement you've seen somewhere before. Then sand again. More sand. More sand.
The harbour mixer takes it all and runs for three to four minutes. You don't touch it. You just watch.
I've seen Salt Bae. The wrist, the salt, the performance of precision. That's what it looked like. Except this was concrete. And these men were not performing — they were working. There is a difference and you can feel it.
“The synchrony of the crew”
This was the day we poured the ground floor slab.
I had been waiting for this day longer than I want to admit. The night before ;Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday .I was running through the list. Will it rain? Has the harbour mixer arrived? The previous day when i had left , it hadn't shown up. Which one would come this time? Will the slab turn out like I see it in my head? I don't think I slept with any of those questions answered.
And when it came I didn't want to miss a second of it . So I filmed everything. Every bucket. Every pour. Every pass of the mixer. I walked every part of the site. The sun was not too scorching. I wanted to be there. I only had to worry about keeping the camera steady.
The crew is what stopped me.
We were 25 men that day. Maybe more. The team had doubled, maybe tripled, from a normal site day because this day demanded it. And watching them work was not like watching a construction site. It was like watching something that had been rehearsed. Not because they had worked together before. But because they knew the work. Each of them knew their part. The man with the water knew when to pour. The man with the sand knew how much more. The men laying the steel, moving the mixture through the wire mesh they moved like a unit that had been briefed for a mission and had decided, collectively, to take it seriously.
I put the camera down.
I don't know exactly when. But there was a moment where I stopped filming and just stood there watching the rhythm of it. The synchrony. The way each person moved in relation to the others without looking at the others. Watching men mix concrete on a Tuesday.
Awe. And then respect. Not because they were being paid. But because for them this is their life's work. And they do it to precision.
Then the harbour mixer stopped.
Not wound down stopped. And in that moment every man on site looked up at the same time. Nobody directed them to. Nobody said anything. They just looked up, and looked at each other, and there was something in that exchange that I don't have a word for. Satisfaction is too small. Pride is too loud. It was quieter than both.
The foreman walked the plank to inspect.
I was not filming. All my thoughts were laid squarely on what he would say. I watched him move across the slab, looking at it the way Sam looks at things — slowly, without rushing to a verdict. Then he looked up.
“iko poa”
That was the verdict. And the day was done.
Nobody had taken a lunch break.
Not because anyone told them not to. Because they wanted to finish first and then rest. The work set the terms and they agreed to them without discussion. That's 25 men deciding, without a meeting, that the slab mattered more than the break.
I stayed long after they had left. I sat there looking at the slab this flat, grey, unremarkable surface that I had watched become real over the course of one day and I stared into the distance. The birds were making their sounds and it occurred to me that these were the sounds I wanted to hear from here. These specific birds, this specific valley, this specific quiet after a day of 25 men and a harbour mixer and Salt Bae and concrete.
I drove back to Nairobi at 5pm.
On the way home I had a pack of overnight oats. Long after the team had finished. Long after I had sat there just staring. I don't remember what I had packed in them. The day had filled me up before the food could .I just hadn't noticed until the drive home that I hadn't eaten since morning.
Here's the thing about milestones.
You spend so long working toward them that when they arrive you expect to feel something sudden a rush, a relief, a clear before and after. But the slab didn't feel like that. It felt like a Thursday that didn't know it was supposed to be ordinary. Like 25 men who decided without being asked that this day was worth everything they had. Like a foreman walking a plank and saying four words that somehow carried the weight of everything that came before them.
It looked dope.
That's more than enough.
Thio & Makena
Founders, Lava & Lake 0.6623°S · 36.4375°E · Naivasha, Kenya