We met our team over a 7:30 breakfast of ``real`` coffee (Exciting after days of Nescafe), buns, fruit, yogurt (yum!) and excited faces eager to get the build going. So the 7 of us who had been on Easter lsland now met 12 others. Some were friends from home, and some were brand new friends...what a great group of people aged 18-60 from 4 different provinces and everyone seemed to mesh well already. We split into 3 groups of 6, 6, and 7 as we had 3 build sites and jumped into our vans to get on our way. The weather turned out great. It`s a bit chilly in the morning but was definitely t-shirt weather after 11am or so. Pants are a must here as the work site really is a place where you need your hard hat, gloves, a dust mask and either sunglasses or safety glasses. Things are being passed down from the roof, things are flying up from the floor as you try to chip away cement to make room for new floor being poured later in the week and to dig little trenches which would house new pipes and plumbing. It is a busy work site with limited room to move around.
Santiago is an interesting city to drive through. Very busy traffic, a bit crazy about driving and changing lanes. as we are building in a needy area, you can see lots of graffiti which is sometimes gang related (depending on neighbourhood), but often related to the various soccer teams in town. Chileans are crazy about soccer and in some areas, the colors painted on the bottom parts of electricity poles depict the team popular in that part of town. We`ve been told that in those places, you would never be seen wearing the jersey or colours of a competitive team. Too funny :)
Traffic is busy, lots of dogs everywhere, we saw a peddler walking up between cars in between traffic lights and instead of having a squeegee in his hand, he had an interesting assortment of bike tires, windshield wipers and a couple of other random things. Tons of corner and variety stores with many things familiar from home and lots of bars and fences in front of windows and doors.
The three build sites had three different stories. Chelsea had one group, Alex (who has also done a number of builds already) was kind enough to take on a second group and I had the third group. We all had separate vans and drives, and would only see each other again at the end of the work day. The houses all needed renovations so that in two cases, children could come live at home again as they were now staying in hospitals and in the other case would provide better living conditions for a child at home. Some parts of the homes had to be demolished and others prepared for new floors, walls etc. So tasks differed at the various sites and at my site, we took walls down with hammers, chiseled away on cement floors with hammers or crowbars, took roof trusses and metal sheathing down etc. Physically it was a tiring day day but the families made it all worth it. As a welcome, some of us had balloons waiting for us tied to the front gates, little signs on the wall welcoming us and name tags for our team, the family, as well as interpreters on site and Habitat staff. Amanda and Michelle are on my site, but Chelsea will be able to provide more detail on her work site once back to blogging on here.
Kids are super cute and the language barrier was quickly overcome by sign language and lots of smiles. All the 3 teams worked very hard and we got a ton done for the first day. Meals at the work sites were prepared by the families and ranged from soup to spaghetti etc. Our work day does not finish until about 5:30pm and dinner was at 7. After that, we all found corner stores, bought some Chilean wine at 2 or 3 dollars a bottle and sat around chatting and playing catch phrase. It was a great first day. Tiring and we would likely have some blisters and sore muscles the next day, but that is what this is all about :)
No comments:
Post a Comment