Wednesday April 16, 2014

I’m sitting here in the breezeway of the church that also serves as a classroom and dinner seating.  We watch the sun set each evening over the tropical Jamaican landscape under the cooling grey clouds.  A nice way to reflect on the day.

But, I should start with a little story from last night.  After lights were out a few minutes, there appeared a blinking light in the rafters.  The usual suspects of a laser light or some other student driven prank were quickly dismissed as we determined that it was a fire fly blinking.  These are pretty large fire flies.  The light is about a quarter of an inch across. Quite impressive.  Once it took off, it headed to the girls side of the room.  We knew it was over there because of all the screaming that was occurring over there.  But then, it headed back over the wall and headed straight for Jake!  He was holding his own flashlight.  As the fire fly landed on him and then started flying around him, Jake was quite animated as he jumped around the room trying the ditch the fire fly.  With his own flash light moving frantically around the room as he was trying to redirect the insect, made it look like he was moving to a strobe light.  While we wanted to sincerely identify with Jake’s terrifying situation, laughing was the only thing we could come up with!

Today, we took on a fairly aggressive task.  We moved sand and gravel up hill to a new mixing site, where we made concrete.  Then we used the bucket brigade method to move the concrete up a steep hill to the footing of a retaining wall.  Everyone worked like dogs today, and you just have to know how hard a dog can work!  It was really hot this morning.  I was really proud of how everyone worked together on this phase of the project. It was very tiring work, and everyone jumped in and helped.  The latter part of the day was devoted to laying block on the two retaining walls, which was a learning experience for many.

This afternoon, we quit a half hour early so that we could go to the make shift market that was set up for our shopping convenience!  Most were vendors selling clothes that they would make in the next two days and deliver to the church where we are staying.  It was interesting that all the lady merchants go to the same fabric store and all buy the same patterns of material, which I guess helps to simplify things.  You just have to find the person you like to work with or find the person with the right price!  I was a nice diversion to our regular evenings.

Tomorrow is our last work day.  We will be looking at Thursday with mixed emotions.