Sorry everyone! I was super exhausted yesterday and I decided to combine yesterday and today into one post. It's been a fantastic adventure to say the least! Yesterday, the day started with moving cinder block from the front of the church to upstairs of the back of the church. This is when we learned the power of the "chain gang" as Miriam affectionately calls our system. We quickly moved on to shoveling rocks from the floor of the hallways and working on our main mission which was finishing the stairs into the sanctuary. Essentially this was a repetition of waiting for a while as the Haitian workers mixed the concrete and then quickly constructed an assembly line to get the concrete to the stairs. We strategized on the best way to strengthen this system and ended up with a very efficient process.
The best part of the day was the down time when we would get to sign with our Haitian friends. We would laugh, play throw-the-rock-into-the-can (which was invented by the teenager in lieu of their cellphone games), and learn new signs. The day flew by, but it was very rewarding to see the completed stairs. We also found that there had been a lot of progress made in the way of electrical work and plumbing (mostly through Butch and the contracted Haitian workers).
Today, we got to the site knowing that we would mostly work on laying concrete in the rooms in the back of the church. Tony gave us the order to rest while they mixed and work hard when the concrete was ready. The assembly line turned out to be the soul purpose of the day, we would switch around placements, but essentially worked on laying concrete. There were some in our group that did other tasks, like Butch who continued to work on construction and Jim who worked on painting the bathrooms, but the rest of us were concrete kings and queens. Many of us had joyful interactions with our new friends. We communicated much better than the day before. I was especially excited to talk with a man named Edner for about 20 minutes in sign language. Dana had a great time with a little boy who was waiting around for his parents. He was shy, but soon Dana was playing with him and giving him high-fives. This community is so loving and thankful!
We also had a chance to buy some of their goods today and some of us have bracelets now. The day flew by and we enjoyed our homemade pizza at home. We've had our newbies tell us that they love this trip and they are so glad they came and that is so special to me! Tomorrow we are going to the beach and we are all very exciting that this venture starts at 10am! We're sleeping in! Here's to enjoying the real Haiti waters tomorrow
~Abigail
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