Loading Sand at Dhelvies

Dhelvies is the name of the company in Magatas Sibulan where we purchase the materials used in building our house. Some of the materials purchased at Dhelvies include cement, hollow blocks, sand, gravel and re bar.

My wife and I have been to Dhelvies several times to order the materials we needed and to pay for the materials that have been, or will be, delivered, as well.

In a post from January, I put up a video of one of their delivery trucks getting stuck in mud while bringing a load of sand to our property. I've seen the sand and gravel on the ground at their place of business, and I've seen the trucks, full of sand or gravel emptying their load, but I had never witnessed just how the sand or gravel was loaded onto the dump truck. In all my visits to Dhelvies, I have never seen a bucket loader. Of course, there is the possibility that there is one at the location, but kept in another area until needed. I had my doubts about that, however.

My question was answered this morning when I saw two men using shovels to transfer sand from one truck to another. If there had been a bucket loader on the premises, the most sensible way to move the sand would have been to dump the sand onto the ground and then load the sand onto the second truck using the loader. Obviously, using a loader would involve much less work than having men do the work with shovels.

Mark this as yet another reason why I am so ever grateful that I was not born in this country. I might not have had a glamorous, high paying job when I was working in the U.S., but these men probably make somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 350 Philippine Pesos a day doing manual labor. This is not an hour's pay - it's for the whole day. At the current rate of exchange, 350 pesos amounts to about 7 U.S. dollars. I can't imagine having to do the work they do, while earning less money after a day's work, than the minimum wage worker in the U.S. makes in one hour.