Today we had to start reworking the septic tank system because it had not been done properly the first time, and the students were (as could be expected) less than thrilled about it. It’s no mean feat to dig down almost eight feet in hard clay to dig two holes more than three feet in diameter. It is less pleasant to have to dig those holes twice because they were not put in the right location the first time. A fellow mensch teacher and I were helping them out, though, so they were not too upset at us at least, since we are performing the rare (and possibly unprecedented) feat of building a dry gravity flow septic system in Thailand, a place where careful engineering practices are, to put it charitably, rather few and far between. If you want something done right, sometimes you have to do at least some of the work yourself, with measuring tape and all.

We waste a lot of work by not doing something right the first time. Often we are too impatient to get started, not realizing that a little bit of time spent ahead of time measuring and planning can save much more time digging holes and shoveling dirt around (which is not the most enjoyable sort of work to me at least). But doing such work correctly requires attention to detail, and responsible supervision. Considering I will have these same workers for a house project later this year (which I am sure will be the subject of many blog entries for those of you who want to read about my experiences a construction manager of marginally English speaking workers in the third world), it is helpful to see how they work and what needs to be done to make that work useful.

One thing I have to say is that the people working with us today (and in general on this project) work hard. Anyone who can swing a hoe to break up hard clay and tear chunks off at a time as the students and teachers did today can certainly work hard at manual labor for a time (even if some of us, like myself, do not generally seek out such work). There are some people who do not work as hard, and they are not as useful for projects like this. The problem is not the absence of hard workers, but the absence of overall planning and direction that has gone into projects, where unqualified people lacking knowledge are given creative control without knowing what to do with it, and where those who would know what they are doing do not know what is being done.

But what’s done is done, and all one can do is do better the next time, learning a bit, becoming a bit more active and aware, and spending a bit more time and effort trying to correct the errors of the past and make sure they are not repeated. Obviously this is a lesson that can be applied far outside of the matter of digging holes in the earth for a septic tank, and I know this is a lesson that has been hammered home to me quite a lot recently, so I suppose yet another reminder of it is something that I can put to use. It is so much easier to do things when one does not have to undo the misspent time and effort and mistakes of the past. But how to get it right the first time, how to plan properly and prepare, that requires a mindset that looks beyond the urgent to what is truly important, and that change in mindset separates those who can plan for and exploit opportunity and those who are merely held captive by circumstances. May we all become people who are able and willing to take advantage of the opportunities to see because we have prepared ourselves to do so.