Trip 1: Day 7

After a fun weekend of hiking volcanos, (actually just one), it was back to work today. Of course, last week, we finished the wall of the house completely. So, today we would do the last of the concrete work.
The house is made with one wall higher so that the roof slopes down. So, in order to fill in the gap between the roof material and the side walls, it was necessary to make a sloped form of concrete along the top of the two side walls. I wish I had a picture. Hopefully you know what I mean.
Anyway, Hennio and Edgar (our Guatemalan building guides) secured wooden forms on both sides, and the rest of us mixed concrete and the forms were all poured.



We had a massive pile of concrete to be mixed today, bigger than usual because we were also pouring the entire floor of the house as well as a small ramp next to the front door. And it all gets mixed by hand: the sandy dirt, the bags of cement powder, and then rocks and water.

So we got an assembly line going with some of us mixing the water in (Edgar and Cesar -father of the family), some of us shoveling the cement into buckets, some of us carrying the buckets into the house to be poured, Fred dumping the buckets where they were needed, and Hennio leveling the cement to achieve a nice clean-looking surface. Finally, forms were made for a small ramp outside of the entrance of the house, and that concrete was poured too.

Oh, by the way, Patrick Fuller took off today to head back to the states (he's got a Maymester program he's got to do in order to graduate on time, so it's legit). But without him, we sure had a lot of work to make up for. man.

Patrick played a bit of soccer with the chill'ns around the place. Those kids are just tumbling all over each other, and never seem to get hurt. And then we were done with work for the day (early) so we headed down to the town's soccer field (a outdoor concrete basketball court - of course they don't use it for basketball!) for some soccer with Guatemalans from other building crews. In general, we learned that Americans aren't the best at goalie (Fred, Patrick, and I).

Something to note is that everything in Guatemala is S L O W. This is true except for cars. In restaurants, it's almost as if the waiters avoid you. This isn't the case, it's just that they assume you are in no rush to leave. It's not like in American restaurants where they're constantly coming back, trying to get you out of there as fast as possible so they can take another crowd in. No, here you almost have to act like you're going to leave without paying in order to get their attention. Let's see....oh, the internet is slow too. And even fast food is slow.
Today we tryed a fast food chain restaurant called Pollo Campero (pronounced "poyo" -this means chicken) and must've waited half an hour for our food.

Honestly, us trip one folks are nearly at the bittersweet end of an eye-opening experience. Tomorrow, the house will be painted and a tin roof will be put up. Thanks for keeping up with us thus far, and God Bless.