Day 5 and 6 for St. Louis
Day 5
Back to building! Today we arrived to find the roofs on the 2 houses and the smooth coat going on inside and out. “Very Interesting.” We learned a lot that day from making cement mixture for a smooth coat, to pasting the walls and smoothing. Lots of sweat that day.
We also leveled the floors inside the houses to prepare for the cement floor pouring the next day. The floors have been raised about 3 feet from ground level with rocks, dirt, and old broken cinder blocks. They are raised to keep the houses dry when the village get flooded (which sounds like it happens fairly often). We leveled them out with a pick-axe and shovels and hands and then hauled in wheel-barrows of dirt to level it out completely.
After a hard day of work some of us went for a swim, others went shopping, and others hung out at the resort. After supper we played some pool while watching Reanne get her hair braided and extended. There was a lot of laughing that evening.
Sean & Michelle
Day 6
Today our group split in half with one group going to play with the kids and the other on the worksite and a switch at lunch. I went with the kids in the morning. When we first arrived there was almost no one there, but we pulled out the jump ropes and the balls and pretty soon the area was full. Nettie sang local jump rope songs with the kids and Tammy taught them how to play with a Chinese skipping rope. There was nail painting and catch, but I mostly stayed out of it. A little girl named Nadia attached herself to me and was too sweet to put down. She just wanted to be carried by someone, so I held her all morning and my arms were tired by lunch. In the afternoon we mixed concrete and used it to fill in the floors. There was a little bit of smooth coat to be finished, but that was mostly done. We spent most of our time with a wheel barrow moving sand for the concrete and mixing it up with shovels. Some times the kids came to help shovel for awhile. Mostly they played. One of the boys had a mask and chased the chickens around with it. It was pretty cute.
In the evening we went to “La union Bate” and watched Madagascar in Spanish with the kids. It was really awesome. When we pulled up to the village we were welcomed by a stampede of screaming children (now we know how Justin Beiber feels, LOL). We had to stop the movie and the kids had to move out of the way to let a car go through. We also had motorcycles with police with their guns patrolling the village, right through our movie. Pretty different night at the movies, but it was a great experience.
Nitara