One More Week

Hi everybody,
Things here are going well. We spent the week working at one project the whole time so its good not to be shuffling around anymore. We joined a project rebuilding an adobe brick house. Previously the other volunteers took off all the clay roof tiles, took down the roof beams and then took down all the bricks. An area next to the old house was dug out and leveled and then trenches for a foundation were dug out and a foundation of rocks and cement was laid. We´re now at the stage were we´re laying the bricks and mixing mud to be used as mortar between the bricks and the layers of brick. We don´t actually get to position the bricks so we mostly carry bricks from one pile to another for a few hours. There is a lot of down time on these types of houses because we have to wait for a whole layer of bricks to be placed before we can fill in the mud. So generally we carry bricks for a bit, rest and chat for quite a while, carry more bricks and then chat for the remainder of the day. All the other projects are progressing slowly like ours so we don´t feel so badly.

Tab and I haven´t really worked out who´s who in the family we´re building for. There are a lot of people around and maybe two generations of a family in the house. There are two strange little kids at the house that usually play together and avoid us although occasionally the little girl Elisa will violently attack Tab or I in what might be an attempted hug. It´s sort of uncomfortable and hilarious all at once. The kids at all our projects just sort of roam free and we´ve both noticed that they don´t get much attention or supervision of any sort because their parents and older siblings are busy working. I´ve stopped freaking out when the kids start swinging around machetes although this week it was alarming that the little girl who is around 4 was starting little fires around the work site. We also saw her consume an entire plastic baggy but no one else seemed to bat an eye.

Quite a few volunteers are done this week and off to travel around Honduras. One of the guys bought a pinata this week and we had a little going away party at a lagoon by our work site. The pinata was a big blue dog that sadly didn´t hold up for too long, but that was followed by hours of eating candy. A group us also went out to a ¨disco¨here in town. The night life here is almost nonexistent as you can tell by the fact that the disco closes a 10pm. Seeing people finish their projects makes us both eager to be travelling and we´re already thinking about our last day and our next week of doing the touristy vacation thing!