Esperanza Day 6: Friday

Today was the last day of work, a lot of us were trying to get done as much as we could at the work site knowing it was the final hours. A lot of the people who had come before in our group and those who came for the first time really liked the family and the young boys that came to help today.en with the language barrier we were able to work very well together with a lot of scratching our heads and pointing, with some  laughter here and there. For lunch they had a very Americanized Mexican meal for us, trying to make it more catered to us, and for the first time they brought soda for us, where for the other meals they served drink mixes that they called agua (water) but they were flavored with fruits or flowers, different each day, loved by everyone! ( before you read this clench your fist grit you teeth and read son)
Today started out SLOW... everybody seemed tired, but everything changed when we started making progress and got into the groove of things. We had myself (Brian) using the jack hammer, actually almost everyone in our group has used it at some point this week. But this was my time to shine :) And boy did I break up that dirt as Jim and Lu shoveled it up and gave it to Jeri to send it down the bucket line to get rid of it. I got 20 inches deep and we needed to get to 28 before the foundation could be poured. But I heard that Tony the man down in the dungeon (the spot we poured all the dirt) was the only one down there expressing distress at the lack of support (you can stop clenching at this point). So I got on my high horse and went down into the dungeon to help Tony. But a catastrophic event occurred, (a note from the editor: this explanation for dramatic effect was described a little more with flare than it really was, but as an Irish friend once said: "don't let the facts get in the way of a good story" this note is only to prevent unnecessarily high blood pressure over the concern of our safety 😉) with so much dirt being sent down the shoot, the support pillar gave way, putting us in a bind, so myself Tony and newly arrived and curious volunteer, Victor, who doesn't speak english, fixed the support beam by bracing it with a fallen 2x4 and that meant that that support was weak so we had to constantly shovel the dirt off of it. Luckily at that point we had four people down there to help down in the dungeon. If that wasn't bad enough more problems in the dungeon arose. The place  where we were moving the dirt to was supported by cement blocks that weren't concreted together but were just sitting on top of each other. So if you can guess what happened as we were moving the dirt, feeling good about everything and had the 5 minute mark before the day was over, the cement blocks toppled over each other and cracked letting the dirt spill onto the road. Just out of courtesy we were trying to clean it up putting it on the pile and fix it up, quite the grand finale. After the group picture was taken, the dirt bucket challenge happened, where they dumped buckets of dirt on each other, then we had to get going because we were going to a presentation where people showed us how they used recycled chip bags to make all kinds of things including purses and jewelry for financial reasons. I wish I could tell you more about that presentation but before the women arrived I fell asleep sitting on the couch, and no one woke me up. And about an hour later our youth minister asked me to write this blog, so I had no preparation. Hope it was a good read, signing off I'm done.
Anonymous Brian :)