Monday April 7 - First Day of Building in La Florida

This was the first day of the build.  After a substantial breakfast at the camp, we took the ride into town to Fuller Center office, about 1.5 km from the camp.  We saw just how little they have in material goods but how much warmth and heart they had.  We were introduced to a number of people, including the two masons who will be working with us.  We then all took pieces of scaffolding and walked the 0.5 km to the work site.  The land for each of the three houses is owned by each family.  They had to complete the foundation before Fuller Center would commit to helping them.  Once done, they will have a mortgage of 150 PS per month.  Of the 20 plus houses built by Fuller in La Florida since 2009, families have been able to meet their mortgages and a couple have even paid theirs off early.  I learned that of the money we volunteers paid to Fuller, $400 (there are sixteen people on our team) was a donation to Fuller to help pay for materials, the paid masons, tools, and operation of the office.

Blue prints for the standard Fuller house

Deanna and Valerie in the open storage/work space that Fuller has

Fuller's pride and joy - a cement mixer for when they pour the concrete floors and pillars

The three houses are on the side of a hill.  The foundation of each house is higher up than the roof on the house below it – a very steep and tall house.  I took some videos of the homes and the beautiful view they have across town and the mountains on the other side. 

The town is very poor.  While there is electricity and there are street lights, the streets are not paved.  There are about 5,000 residents, but less than five buildings are two stories tall.  Since it is the desert, nothing grows naturally – all plants require water delivered from the springs.  There is a lot of farming in the area and because of irrigation, they appear to be successful in growing crops in the desert.

While two people worked with each mason, the major job for the remaining twelve of us was to unload a truck of cement and bricks.  There were twenty bags of cement, each weighing 42.5 kg (almost 100 pounds). Ten had to be walked up the hill to the highest home.  Several of us volunteers struggled up the hill with a bag either on our shoulder or head.  The truck crew practically danced up the hill carrying a bag on their head.  Ten bags were carried into storage near the lowest home.  There were 1,000 red clay bricks to unload. They are a bit larger than what we have in the USA – about three inches thick, four inches wide and nine inches long.  They were solid – none of the holes in the middle reducing weight and clay as in America.  We helped unload and one of the truck crew stacked – but most of the bricks were unloaded by the truck driver and the third crew member.  While we volunteers were taking one brick at a time, the driver took two and tossed them to his mate who was stacking them.  Most interesting was that they used no gloves.  Most of us volunteers used gloves and wore through them by the end of the day.

Our task for the day was to move those 1,000 bricks from where they were unloaded up to the highest house.  We made of line and either tossed or handed them to the next person in line with the last person stacking them – but our line of people only got them about half way up the hill.  So we would move about 70-80 halfway up the hill, then move the line from that pile up to the house and move the 70-80 again.  For much of the movement, I chose to be the guy who took the bricks from the pile and tossed them about ten feet to the first guy on the line. That means we moved 1,000 bricks twice.  There was also 1,000 bricks that had been previously delivered to the lowest house – the last several hundred also had to be carried across the street and into that house.  And after our cheers died down from finishing delivering the 1,000 bricks to the highest house – we found out that we had to move the dump truck load of sand up to the highest house.  So we started taking buckets of sand up the long walk to the highest house.  Tuesday, we will need to finish that movement of sand, and sometime during the week, another couple thousand bricks will be delivered and carried into the homes.

At the end of the day, Zenon showed up with 12 bottles of cold Casqueña beer.  The camp does not allow alcohol, so the 16 volunteers, 2 masons and 4 family members relaxed for about 30 minutes and enjoyed the cold beer and companionship.  Grace is the five year old daughter of one of the home owners.  After going to school in the morning (when we arrived at the office at 8:00 this morning, she was in her school uniform), Grace was at the build site and her playfulness helped us make the most of the mundane and exhausting tasks.  While enjoying the beer, she had Jim and Mike helping her cut out paper dolls and other things.  She came to play with me and was a delight when I lifted her on my shoulders – upon removing my hat, she thought that my bald head was one of the funniest things she had ever seen.  She thought my head was a great thing to play with.

After a shower and an excellent dinner of vegetable barley soup, fried rice, salad and bread, and a dessert of mango ice cream on pie, I crashed.  I just needed to lie down, so I went back to my room and managed to get a crossword puzzle done before falling to sleep around 8:15.  (My wonderful wife bought me a book of NY Times Sunday Crossword puzzles for Christmas a couple of years ago; I completed #145 of 165 puzzles).