Day 5

Day 5...Day 5...where fore art thou Day 5...Not in my memory .....oh wait now I remember....

On Wednesday my group headed out to Moa Loloa again to help out at the kitchen where children are fed.....that's for you Judy. The church building is being used at lunch time for the kids to come and have a meal prepared by a group of ladies and volunteers. I was tasked to help make tortillas. The dough was already made up by the group the day before so all I had to do was place the dough ball onto the flattening device and then lay the dough onto the griddle. Well, it seems easy but getting the dough to be flat on the griddle was not. I also was not fast enough in this process and was replaced. Below is a picture of my tortilla teacher. Notice the wad of dough in front of the bowl. Yes, that is the tortillas that I messed up.

Here are some pics of the kids

Day Four

Day four begins the same as day three.....with my roommates up before the roosters. This day I made it to breakfast.

On this day the goup I was with headed out to build a house in the community called Moa Lolola (sp?) Let me describe it to you. It is a really tall steep mountain with a little crick running a the base and another really tall steep mountain on the other side. If you are walking up or down it you have to take an O2 tank, repelling rope and spikes. Luckily for us we got a ride up to the house site by Jen Arnold...yea Jen!! Once we got there we found out that all teh building materials had been unloaded at the wrong place and we needed to move it all. Let me fill you in on the "building materials." It is all the lumber, boxes of nails, buckets of hammers, levels and such, post hole diggers, rock spikes taller than me, roofing materials (sheets and sheets of aluminum). We had to get all of this from the road down to the site about 60 feet straight down and another 30 feet over. We started carrying the board (2x4s, 4x4 and some other big something by something). I did not have a partner so I carried one board on my shoulder at a time, but then we got wise and made a line and slide the boards down. Of course if you were at the bottom of the assembly line there was an 80% chance that your legs were gonna get knocked out from under you. The building site was not quite ready for building so the boys and friends of the home owner worked the land until it was just right.

It began to rain and when it was raining it was chilly, so I played the put the rain coat on and take it off game all day. I think though, that this building site was my favorite of all time. The land was so steep that it created a huge crawl space and we had to build the front wall up last, which made for awesome pics. It was sooo beautiful. The view was worth a million dollars, but the house only a thousand. Oh Judy and I managed to wack a little girl in the head while moving boards around. OOPS!! Below is a pic of the finished project. Its the house with the stilts.

Day 3

Day 3 began, for me, extremely early. Monday morning is when i found out that my roommate who will remain nameless, liked to get up at the butt crack of dawn to take showers and get ready and such. I beleive I was asked at like 6:18am if I wanted the shower next.....NO, NO I didn't. I wanted to sleep....which had I gotten to sleep past 5:45 am I would have been a little more prepared for the next night, which I will go into later.

OK so, the earth is round...just kidding.....

Monday I headed out to Santa Ana to build a house. We stopped by Casa de Esperanza to plan the groups for the day and such. My group ended up hanging out for a while while we waited for supplies and automobiles to arrive to take us to our building site. While we waited kids were played with, soccer balls were kicked and about 3 cans of spray on sun screen was applied.

We piled in out truck when it got there and headed out to our building site. Once there we hiked to the spot....but wait....we didn't have tools yet so we waited for them to be brought.....but there were some over achivers in our group who said, "Tools, who needs shovels, post hole diggers and rock spikes when you have hands. Tools big deal." So we began digging the post holes with our hand...in the very rocky ground. Judy and I, after about 3 seconds got wise and started providing the entertainment for the afternoon.......movies quotes!! There was everything from Steele Magnolias to Shrek, from Fox and the Hound to The Princess Bride.

Judy and I working really hard

It may look like I am just standing around, but I actually finished hammering before the boys and am waiting on them to finish.

The tools finally came and up went the house. Judy manned the wood pile, while I drove in nails, Janice fell down the mountain and Brett played under the house. Another group came and helped us finish up.

Monday night we all, except for a group that Brett took to see the Matt at the hospital, went to the Jesus Statue. It was kinda sprinkling and wanted to rain, but it held off while we were there. Mark led devo and introduced us to the panting deer, while Jenny sang the wrong line to "Have you seen Jesus" and Margaret told Leslie that she broke her butt b/c she has a crack in it. There was laughing.

After we got settled in for the night I was awakened by knocking on the door. It was Judy who came to get me b/c there was lady who was sick. We stayed up with here for a bit, and decided that it was probably HTP (honduran toliet party) but in the morning she was getting worse, so after consulting with Dr. Tom we advised Terry the she needed to be taken to the hospital. She was and was admitted for acute pancreatitis. She was eventually flown back to the states on Friday.

So ends day three.