Thursday, April 17, 2014

Our work day started out much the same as it has for the past four days.  Up at around 7, breakfast at 7:30, and on the bus by 8:30 to ride to our project in Cambridge, about 20 minutes away.

The bus ride is like it is in so many other countries.  The bus looks pretty nice on the outside, and a little worn on the inside.  We get on the bus with our two supervisors in the morning.  With the driver that would make 21 total passengers on a bus that will seat 24 if you include the seats that fold down into the isles.  For some reason, I think that the bus has been chartered for us, but it is clear that if it is a bus, that is going the right direction, and particularly if one of our supervisors happens to know them, the bus is open to them as well.  And since the charter has been paid for, there is no bus fare required!!  Needless to say, these supervisors know a lot of people!!  This morning I think there were nearly 40 people on the bus!  It was really hard not to get acquainted!

For work today, our supervisors built a horizontal bond beam on the retaining wall that we started yesterday.  Our team build the reinforcing steel cage that goes inside the bond beam.  Of course the bond beam needs to be filled with concrete, which meant a bucket brigade of hauling 24 buckets of sand and 40 buckets of gravel to the mixing pad on the road in front of retaining wall!  We are very experience at this task now and can do it without assistance!

While the concrete was being mixed, a smaller team was working on laying block on the side retaining wall that is stair stepped up the side of the yard.  All hard labor.  There must be something we are paying for.

For the last hour of the day, some foolishly thought that we might just have the afternoon off.  The reality call was from Pastor Gordon as he told us that there was a teacher at the school who had three children of her own.  She was working on an addition for her small house.  She had a perimeter foundation and walls build for the room, but needed to fill in the space between the foundation walls so that a slab could be poured.  She had arranged to have a dump truck load of fill dirt dumped on the abandoned railroad tracks about 150 feet from the room.  She had been carrying the fill dirt in a bucket from the pile to the house for some time . . . a very slow process.  In about 50 minutes, with our now perfected chain gang bucket brigade we were able to move all the dirt back to the room so that she could start preparing for the slab.  She was so grateful!  I think she personally thanked every person on our team.  It was hard work, in the sun for most of the project, but seeing how happy she was made it so worth the little extra effort it took to meet her needs.

We posed for our last photo at the site, said farewells to our new friends, wiped away a few tears and headed back to our temporary home.  We were blessed by a rainstorm that lasted for an hour or so, which helped to cool the evening and set up the perfect conditions for a great meal, a great sunset, and a great end to our work week.

For worship this evening, Spencer and Jake talked about how good it has felt to communicate face to face instead of text to text and how closer we all feel when we don’t depend on technology to connect with each other.  It was a great discussion.