This month, my squad is living and working together. Every day we either walk or get some sort of ride to our ministry site. Our ministry site is a school/church that is being rebuilt. It fell after the earthquake and now is being built to California and Florida state codes so it can survive any future earthquake. Currently, there is one building that is being used for both church and every grade in school and it’s not the biggest building.
My squad goes to the site and mainly helps with construction. There are a few other projects that get worked on as well, but mainly we work really hard in the hot sun. Our hardest day thus far was Wednesday. It started at 6:15am with me waking up to the sound of the ocean (and the beeping of my watch alarm) and then breakfast at 6:30am. After that, we walked to our construction site (about 25 minutes) and saw all the workers unloading a truck full of bags of cement. By truck full, I mean 1,000 bags of cement each weighing almost 100 pounds each. Some of the guys started helping carry them from the truck into a room and then me and two other awesome girls hopped up on the truck and started moving the bags so the guys could grab them. Me being as stubborn as I am, decided I could lift bags by myself. I could…for about 6 bags and then I needed a friend to help. Eventually more people helped us and we finished the truck! Then another truck full of 1,000 more bags of 100 pound cement bags drove in. So, we started lifting again. We finished and took pictures of our success, and then realized it was only 10am and my arms were tired as heck.
The next 2.5 hours were filled with random construction projects and lots more sweating. After that we had lunch, which was wonderful like always. Then we were told to take a little break because at 2pm we were going to have a cement bucket brigade. Most people didn’t take much of a break and at 3:05pm we started our cement bucket brigade which means we made a line and passed buckets of cement back and forth until we filled what needed to be filled. We had five walls that needed cement and the first took exactly one hour. The second took about 40 minutes and then the Haitians took over. They filled the buckets to the top and would carry them to the wall and we would take the empty buckets back. The next three walls took under an hour and a half. That’s embarrassing (for us).
Anyways, at about 7:30pm we were ready to go home. Since it was dark we weren’t allowed to walk home so they rented a big truck and we got a ride home. When we got home, we ate dinner, had feedback (something our teams do every night) and went right to bed.
Needless to say, after working literally all day in the hot sun, lifting very heavy things and getting extremely dirty, we were all exhausted and became really sore. A few people also got cement poisoning which isn’t really a huge deal, just annoying.
So that was my 10.5 hour work day and today (Saturday) was my 14 hour work day! We did random construction in the morning (I mostly cut and bend rebar) and then after lunch we poured concrete for 9 hours! I’d give more details, but since I have to wake up in 6 hours I’m going right to sleep!
Sorry there aren’t any pictures, our internet is a little USB card and we have very limited time on it, but pictures will come whenever I get better internet (so hopefully sometime this year).
