"It's like fighting, um." When he said this, Pan stood in the stilling pool under the dam, tilting his head to look at the top of the dam that had just been shut down for 59 days. Sweat ran down the rim of the helmet and down his scalp, forming a circle of wet marks under the collar of his shirt. I stood one meter to his left and looked up 60 degrees, at the same height as his eyes. The only difference was that I was sweating a little bit more and my whole back was soaking wet.

Sweat crawled all over my head and it felt very itchy. I wanted to sneak off my helmet and scratch my head to relieve the itch when no one was watching. But after all, I didn't dare to listen to the sound of the tower crane slowly passing by. I had to stick my fingers into the seam of the hat and scratch twice, but it got more itchy. I shook my head impatiently, and a drop of sweat just slipped into my eyes. I wanted to wipe it with my hands, but I got a lot of oil on my hands when I just climbed the ladder; I wanted to wipe it with my sleeves, but there was a lot of old dirt on the sleeves. The ingredients are nothing more than cement or pozzolan. In short, alkaline is strong. I'm still young and don't want to be blind yet. I ended up wiping it off with the back of my hand because that's how it looks the least dirty.

Pan is always the deputy chief engineer of this project and my master, responsible for the "internal affairs" of the entire project technology. What to do, how to do it, and which to do first depends on Mr. Pan's arrangement. I have another master, General Manager Zhang, who is the chief engineer of this project. He is in charge of the "diplomatic work" of this project, including arguing with the owner, arguing with subcontractors, and explaining to the supervisor, "We do this just because it is more expensive. Well, not to make up for some terrible catastrophe."

I am the fake chief engineer of this project. My main job is to impersonate the chief engineer, track all their work, and learn how to be a chief engineer until this project is over. On the good days when the few owners didn't invite us to a meeting, I would go to the dam with General Manager Pan, pointing at the nasty formwork, steel bars, and copper waterstops. At first, Mr. Pan gave me some advice, and I watched. Now I can tell you what to do.

The roller compacted concrete pouring of the dam has just ushered in a temporary closure. For 59 consecutive days, the dam has risen from 94.8 meters to 136 meters in one go, and the height has been continuously increased by 41.2 meters. To put it simply, the position we are standing in now has risen from looking up to 60 degrees. We all agree that the high probability of 41.2 meters should be the world record, because the continuous ascent record that can be found on the Internet is only more than 30 meters. No one had ever claimed a world record like this before, so we decided not to. 59 days, not 59 8 hours, but 59 consecutive 24 hours.

For Chinese foremen and local workers, that means 59 hours straight from 6am to 6pm, or 59 hours straight from 6pm to 6am. Just a few days of school closures, how many are from 6 am to 6 pm, and how many are 59 days? The Tanzanian workers working on this dam are proud. First, their wages are not low. Even the most basic "general workers" earn three times the per capita GDP of Tanzania, not to mention that a considerable part of Tanzania's population has no employment at all, and accordingly has no income. Second, each of them should know that the completion of this dam means that Tanzania's power generation will double; on this basis, farmland, factories, education and medical care, and more power stations will become possible," The endless cycle of poor and poor” will be slightly broken. Thanks to the dam, millions of households in Tanzania are able to eat and get electricity, including themselves.

Most of them should also know that in order to build the dam, their government has raised pretty high taxes and stopped many other "less urgent" government investments. Every Tanzanian with a belt is waiting for them to send electricity a day earlier. I tend to believe that a small percentage of them also know that electricity and the industries it supports will fundamentally change the way people live in this country. Their children will know the shape of the world, how this society works, Mendel, Faraday and how to be masters of their own lives. They won't give birth to many offspring in the dark, and then watch most of these children die before they grow up.

They don't know the reason, and they don't pursue it. They will usher in a completely different country, a completely different self. I know what you want to ask, but you don't want to hear it right now. Yes, of course, and it went up a lot. According to the overall income standard of Tanzania, Kamalu can be called a veritable "high-income person in the California Bay Area". Wages are critical for grouting workers. But his heart is not just wages, but Tanzania. Because he is Tanzanian.

"Do you think the future of Tanzania will be good?" I asked General Manager Pan. "I think I can." Pan is always confident. "They have that spirit." The Chinese are all too familiar with that spirit, a desire for change. Our generation grew up under the influence of this spirit. I fully trust General Pan's judgment. He is ten years older than me, from South America to Africa.

He has done many projects, traveled to many countries, and met many more people. He was sure there was hope for Tanzania because he saw that Tanzania was different from other countries he had been to. But I also know that Tanzania's future will never be smooth sailing. In the future, I don't know how many storms are waiting for it. No matter how fast a country develops, the accumulation of material wealth will never keep up with the expansion of people's desires. In other words, the richer a person is, the poorer he feels, and the more he feels that society owes him. No matter how strong its public investment is, the rate of construction of public goods will never keep up with the rate of increase of private goods. In other words, the more roads a country builds, the more people buy cars, and the more likely it is that traffic will be paralyzed. RCC gravity dam is a special kind of structure.

In theory, its life span is one or two hundred years, but in practice it is difficult to estimate, often even longer than a country. I buried a coin in concrete, and the next intelligent creature I see will likely belong to the next civilization after humans. Humans are truly amazing creatures, capable of creating things far more powerful than themselves. I can often see myself in the aerial photos of my colleagues, huddled in a crowd of roaring diesel behemoths. The dam is like a mountain, the bulldozer is like a matchbox, I can't even compare to a small ant. It's really hard to imagine that this mountain was built by these little ants. Standing on this half-built dam, I felt like I was at the forefront of civilization. I'm stepping on the civilization we just poured, with the civilization we're about to pour over my head. I take a step forward, and civilization takes a step forward. If the grouting workers Kamalu do not retreat, civilization will not retreat.Editor/XuNing