Caliente Construction

Today we started off the day with the gift of our bags that had arrived! Then on to a nice breakfast of sausages, eggs, and crêpes. After everyone was done and cleaned up, we went over to the school and the work site. There were several jobs, all of which everyone did at least once. We shoveled and sifted the sand to make sure that all of the rocks and pebbles weren’t mixed in, as we were mixing the sand with the cement. We had buckets, which we used to carry the sand up to the construction site, and to carry water from a catchment tank to the construction site. We added dry cement to the sand and used the water to mix it together until it was a “homogenous solution” (Zach). Then we put it in buckets to bring it to the masons working in the back of the building who were plastering it onto the walls.

After a couple hours of working, we went over to the school. We had our sheets of questions that we made yesterday, and we went around and asked the students questions in Swahili, and they asked us questions in English. Some of them actually did what we were supposed to, but most of them had fun just asking us questions, or messing around with us. A couple of them kept telling me that this one kids’ name was Collin, and he insisted it was something else. And one of them took my sheet and was mixing it around with theirs so I couldn’t find it. It was fun.

Then we went outside with them and spread into three different groups. We played several different games, the only one I’d ever played before was duck duck goose. It was interesting having them teach us their games, because their English isn’t good enough to explain them in English. But after a while we caught on. Afterwards, we came back for lunch and then got back to working. We worked the same jobs for a few more hours and then came back to Mama and Baba’s house.

We split into two groups of five and one group went back to do some cooking, while my group went to another house to milk a cow. We met this nice, funny boy about our age on the walk over, we had fun together. Milking the cow was interesting, for some reason I wasn’t expecting the udder to be as warm as it was. It also was harder to get the milk out correctly than I thought it would be. After that, we hung around and Zach and I threw the rugby ball with Baba. A bit of a tiring day, but still really fun.