Hola!
What a remarkable day! I have been working on building the Techo house for a family living in Anexo in Barrio Grenada. Don Job, Dona Lurcretia and their children Stefanie, Darlene and baby Jocelyn live in an extremely poor area of Managua. We started working on their home yesterday and it took only 75 minutes to completely remove everything that they own from the house and to tear the structure down. The house was built from pieces of wood and rusted tin hammered together. The part of that process that hit me was seeing their beds. Two metal bed frames with pieces of card board on top comprised their beds and mattresses. I cannot imagine what they would think if they saw my Queen size bed with a very thick mattress. The whole family lived in a space comparable to the size of my bedroom at home.
Yesterday was a dirty, dusty day. After tearing down the house and beginning to work on the temporary shelter for the family, we came back from lunch and started working on setting the posts ("pilotes") that would support the floor of the Techo house. What dirty, sweaty work! We would take metal poles and dig as far as possible into the dirt and then use plastic containers to scoop out the loose dirt. The holes had to be about two feet deep... man it was a lot of digging and scooping! Then we had to set the pilotes with rocks and more dirt. It also took a very long time to level everything to make sure that the house would sit properly once it was built. I was absolutely filthy when we stopped for the day yesterday!!
Today, we managed to not only finish putting in the pilotes, but we started construction on the house itself. We started by positioning the pieces that make up the floor. I then got the fun job of crawling under the house and hammering the pieces together. I have a bit of a problem with claustophobia, so it took me two or three minutes to get to the right spot, but it felt so good to overcome a fear and be the only Canadian member of our team to complete the task.
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Ezekiel, Brigitte, Parales and Johnathon.
After that, I managed to scrape my arm on the barbed wire fence that divides their yard from the neighbours and had to get it checked out by the doctors at the school site. Dr. Wang cleaned it up for me and put on quite the bandage to protect it from the dust!! When I came back, almost all four walls of the house were put up!! Katelynn, Robert and Julia were in the middle of it all, hammering away at nails and getting everything into place!!
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It looks like we're going to finish the house tomorrow, which is way ahead of our timeline of being finished by Thursday afternoon!! The next steps are putting up the roof and moving the family into their new home!!
Another fantastic part of my day was receiving a party hat and friendship poem from the two girls who live in the house I'm building. They are such beautiful, smart girls and I'm so thankful to have met them. They both get right into the work; digging holes, smashing rocks, hammering nails or doing anything else that needs to be done... and they are 14 and 11 years old. I really hope that the work I'm doing here will have a positive impact on their lives. This is getting long, so I will save stories about the family members themselves for another day.
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Stefanie, Brigitte, Darlene
Thanks for reading!
Brigitte
What a remarkable day! I have been working on building the Techo house for a family living in Anexo in Barrio Grenada. Don Job, Dona Lurcretia and their children Stefanie, Darlene and baby Jocelyn live in an extremely poor area of Managua. We started working on their home yesterday and it took only 75 minutes to completely remove everything that they own from the house and to tear the structure down. The house was built from pieces of wood and rusted tin hammered together. The part of that process that hit me was seeing their beds. Two metal bed frames with pieces of card board on top comprised their beds and mattresses. I cannot imagine what they would think if they saw my Queen size bed with a very thick mattress. The whole family lived in a space comparable to the size of my bedroom at home.
Yesterday was a dirty, dusty day. After tearing down the house and beginning to work on the temporary shelter for the family, we came back from lunch and started working on setting the posts ("pilotes") that would support the floor of the Techo house. What dirty, sweaty work! We would take metal poles and dig as far as possible into the dirt and then use plastic containers to scoop out the loose dirt. The holes had to be about two feet deep... man it was a lot of digging and scooping! Then we had to set the pilotes with rocks and more dirt. It also took a very long time to level everything to make sure that the house would sit properly once it was built. I was absolutely filthy when we stopped for the day yesterday!!
Today, we managed to not only finish putting in the pilotes, but we started construction on the house itself. We started by positioning the pieces that make up the floor. I then got the fun job of crawling under the house and hammering the pieces together. I have a bit of a problem with claustophobia, so it took me two or three minutes to get to the right spot, but it felt so good to overcome a fear and be the only Canadian member of our team to complete the task.
After that, I managed to scrape my arm on the barbed wire fence that divides their yard from the neighbours and had to get it checked out by the doctors at the school site. Dr. Wang cleaned it up for me and put on quite the bandage to protect it from the dust!! When I came back, almost all four walls of the house were put up!! Katelynn, Robert and Julia were in the middle of it all, hammering away at nails and getting everything into place!!
It looks like we're going to finish the house tomorrow, which is way ahead of our timeline of being finished by Thursday afternoon!! The next steps are putting up the roof and moving the family into their new home!!
Another fantastic part of my day was receiving a party hat and friendship poem from the two girls who live in the house I'm building. They are such beautiful, smart girls and I'm so thankful to have met them. They both get right into the work; digging holes, smashing rocks, hammering nails or doing anything else that needs to be done... and they are 14 and 11 years old. I really hope that the work I'm doing here will have a positive impact on their lives. This is getting long, so I will save stories about the family members themselves for another day.
Stefanie, Brigitte, Darlene
Thanks for reading!
Brigitte
1 comment:
We are loving hearing your news. God bless you and all the people you are meeting and working with.
Susan Butler-Jones and Boyd Drake in PEI
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