Up for breakfast at 7am for pancakes with fresh fruit and fantastic Nicaraguan coffee. Off to the adobe factory at 8am. An adobe factory is not the software but a brick making factory. Not in a building but out in the open. This factory is all manual labour. The only machinery available is to press the bricks, and ours was broken today, unfortunately. In the meantime there was plenty of work to be done. In the center of the site was a huge pile of dirt. Some of us had to break up the dirt while others shoveled the dirt through the sifters. The sifters are metal frames that stand over the wheelbarrow. Others in the group were using the sifted dirt to mix the adobe brick recipe which consists of dirt, lime and dry cement. Others were moving already made bricks onto the flatbed truck to be transported to the building site. This was back breaking work, even more so in the hot sun. Because the brick press was being repaired, we broke off into small groups to do other jobs around town in the afternoon. Some continued to shovel and sift. After lunch, we were joined by about 30 local families who were there to do their allocated work in order to earn their Habitat home. All of the women and men showed up wearing flip-flops and not a single hat. They worked solidly without the breaks that all of us Canadians needed to take. They seemed unaffected by the heat. We soon made some new friends. We needed to sift enough wheelbarrows full of dirt in order to make an allotted number of bricks. We surpassed the number needed thanks to our new friends.
Some of the team members who were looking for adventure headed off to deliver materials to other job sites. They all piled into the back of the flatbed truck....safety standards are not even on the radar here! Little did they know that part of their job was to change the flat tire they soon had! A third group of real keeners felt they needed a good workout and set off to dig a foundation. Not only did they finish the foundation they completed the cement footings! They worked overtime for this one!
Nelson, our bus driver, brought us back to the hotel at 4pm. We all headed straight for the pool to cool down. We had a dinner of chicken, beef, sausage, fried plantain and the best Pico di Gallo I have ever tasted. After dinner, Tony was able to get the hockey game on the TV in the dining area! We spent the evening playing Euchre, chatting and sharing lots of stories and laughs.
Bravo everybody !!!!!
ReplyDeleteClaire