Tuesday Morning

We split into two groups this morning. One group travelled by pickup truck to a local village to help the Mobil Library loan books to the students there. That trip will be covered in another post -- hopefully.
The second group, of which I was a part, went back to Baston to continue our work at the school. The day started out cool and breezy but steadily got hotter and hotter, by noon we were a pretty sad looking, sweaty, exhausted bunch. In the end though, we made a good dent in the pretty daunting amount of work that needs to be finished before we leave for the states.

One major task of ours is to plant some fruit trees that will be used to supplement the kid's government supplied lunches. To that end we dug up some manure from the neighboring farm, sifted it and then hauled it back to the site in wheel barrows where we crushed some sort of rocky substance with big wooden mauls and mixed the resulting dirt, the manure and water to form a gelatinous mass of nutrient-rich loose soil for the saplings.

Sifting manure.

The Baston Volcano (manure, dirt and water).

Simultaneously, other parties of our group where painting the bamboo walls of the new preschool and preparing the steel reinforcements for the cement floor -- which will be poured in a day or to (I believe). The toughest task though was digging the holes for the fruit trees to be planted in. Our "jefe" (sp?) stipulated they were to be about two feet deep and a foot and a half across. That seemed impossible in the hard packed, dried out earth, but with right tools -- most important of which was a heavy steel pipe with sharp blade on one end -- we eventually found a way to do it. The technique was to smash away at it with the pipe and a shovel until a few inches were cleared, fill the resulting hole with water, let it soak in, and then smash away again -- repeating until the hole was big enough. Back-breaking stuff. It gave us a real appreciation for the work of the previous UCW trips here when they dug hundreds of feet of trenches for water pipes -- not to mention the year round toiling of the people who live here.

David digging hard.

A freshly painted bamboo wall of the preschool.

This seemed to be the morning ritual for these boys: as soon as they got to school they mopped out the well basin.

The rock crushing maul.

Students scraping the bark off the logs that will be to build the new room.

A much appreciated reward after a long morning.

It felt great to be doing something real like this. I like to say I type for a living. It requires some brain power but at the end of the day when I shut off the computer all that work vanishes. The holes we dug today are still there, they're voids in a sense but they seem much more real than the 1s and 0s that I spend most of my time pushing around.

Alex Brown