The Machine

In seventh grade Performing Arts class, Mr. Agalias asked for a volunteer.

“Someone go to the center of the circle, and start doing something. Anything. Move your arm up and down. Turn your head left to right. Make a noise that corresponds with your action. ‘Swoosh swoosh,’ maybe, or ‘boing boing’. Just do something repetitive.”

Dan, one of our braver classmates, went up first. He turned his knee out, then back in again, saying, “Whee! Whee!” He continued the pattern until Mr. Agalias tapped my head and told me to find an action and noise that fit in with Dan’s. I bent down, and put my arm in the empty space his knee would create, pulling it out every time his knees came back to center. “Boom. Boom.”

We were the machine. One by one, Mr. Agalias would tap us on the head, and each of us would become a working gear of the contraption. Before long, we’d become a bouncing, buzzing, busy cacophony of middle school actors.


Today I find myself part of a very different machine, several thousand miles away from that small theater in Grover Middle School. The machinery of our efforts is much the same as it was those years ago, though our purpose is decidedly more useful. I am in the small tropical paradise of Kanda Valley, working to put the roof on a high new house.

It all begins with the young man on the ground, wearing a shirt reading, “URBAN CHAOS!” He is stamping dirt and rocks and cement together, while a man close by shovels it into metal pans. These pans are picked up and passed, man to man to man to man, up an efficient design of makeshift stairs and scaffolding. Their rhythm is continuous, the pattern accented by grunts and laughs and Kumaoni calls. Cement dumped out on the roof, the trays are passed down to me. I make eye contact with the man below me, and he raises his eyebrows, wordlessly signaling that it’s safe to slide the trays down to him via fraying plastic slide. Whoosh. He runs the trays to the shoveler. And the cycle begins again.

One of the volunteers above me wipes the sweat from the back of his neck, saying, “Man, wouldn’t this be easier if they just had a machine to haul all that cement up here?”

I watch the activity all around me, and shake my head. Look at us. We are the machine.