Last Monday, when we arrived we saw a man standing about knee deep in a hole he was digging near the corner of the property. It turns out his name was Grisha and he was there to dig the reservoir that will hold all the fresh water for the church. My job was to move the dirt he pulled out of the hole further away so it didn’t stack up so close to the hole.
No big deal I thought. We should be done in no time and its pretty easy to just toss the dirt a few meters away. Boy was I wrong. After a few hours Grisha was about shoulder deep and unable to toss dirt out of the hole like he had been doing since I arrived. Now he loaded the dirt into a bucket and handed it to me to dump on the pile.
After doing this for a few hours I had to go find a ladder to get him out of the hole so we could eat lunch. After lunch, he attached a rope to the bucket and it became my job to lift the dirt out of the hole and out it on the pile. At 6 feet deep it was my understanding that we were almost done digging.
The next day we got there slightly ahead of Grisha but right before we started work he pulled two apples out of his pocket and gave me one. Not being an apple fan myself, I was not to thrilled about his gift for me. However, not to turn my nose up at a generous gift, I took a big bite. It was absolutely the best tasting apple of my life. It was like someone had injected a normal apple with super sweet apple juice and sugar, simply amazing!
After thanking him and telling him how good the apple was we started work for the day. He climbed the ladder down into the hole and began to dig. We continued to dig until lunch. When he came out he grabbed another pair of apple out of his bag so we could enjoy a pre-lunch snack.
Sure we were done digging I joined him outside after lunch only to find that we were in-fact still going deeper. At the end of the day we were at around 13 feet deep.
We started concreting the next day and continued the next one too. Each day Grisha brought more apples than before. On Thursday we made a wall surrounding the hole out of stone and concrete.
Friday, as he smoothed out the inside of the reservoir Jon, Mari, and I dug a trench and laid a pipe to connect the reservoir with the church. We took pictures of the completed project and said goodbye to Grisha. But he came back with a sack full of apples for us an hour or so later as we were heading to the car.
It was a hard week of working, but it felt good to work on a project from start to finish, and to forge a friendship with someone who did not speak a lick of English, except for 1, 2, and 3 and apple, which I got to teach him.
