Day 5: We're Old Pros!

Wednesday March 9, 2011

I woke up this morning and went to brush my teeth only to realize that there was no water running from the tap. This wasn’t a large concern until I thought about the end of the day and how desperately we all longed for a cold shower. Thankfully the water was back on shortly before we left for the day.

Having readied the footing for concrete, we still had to finish tying some of the rebar together. When we arrived this morning Emma, Mary and I made a bee-line for the wire cutters and got down to business. Working alongside Oscar, Juan and Antonio, tying wire was Emma’s favorite job and she is now a pro.

A lot of this morning’s work was intricate and time consuming, with the exception of mixing and pouring concrete. We were consumed with this activity starting just before lunch till the end of the day. First we combined in a pile, 8 wheelbarrows worth of course sand and 6 of gravel. After we spread that around, we added 4 bags of cement. We mixed it all up and then divided it into two piles, which we join back into one afterward. We then created a cradle in the middle into which we poured 8 buckets of water. A lot of mixing ensued.

Chris made a pun to rival any of Mr. Jollymore’s when he said of mixing and pouring concrete, “this is a solid workout”.

We finished work for the day and headed back to the hostel. We hit the showers as per usual only to find that the water pump had once again crapped out on us. Mr. Carpenter and I feared that we may have a mutiny on our hands but the kids rallied and endured their filth for another 20 minutes until (quasi-miraculously) the pump rumbled back to life.

We're all having an early night tonight -I think exhaustion, both from the heat and the work, is finally setting in. We'll work our last full day tomorrow before moving on to the resort on Friday afternoon!

I also wanted to give a big shout out to Mr. Carpenter who has been an enormous contributor to this blog and deserves half the credit for it's realization. Thanks dude!