Saturday 03 Jan 2009

Hello from a sore and tired Chandra. Woke up early...or at least before I had to get up. Had breakfast which consisted of PB&J on a bun. It was actually pretty good. We headed out to our first site...a beauty salon and house which we had roughly 4oo cubic feet of mud to clear out. I did one wheelbarrow stint but spent the rest of the morning shoveling. Good thing my trainer has been making me do squats and lots of core work (Thanks Kelly!). The crew of 9 of us managed to push hard to get the place done before lunch. We took our lunch break which consisted of rice, a bean sauce and some cooked vegetables and then headed to our second site. We actually started working at that site yesterday afternoon. Because of all the rain from the storms this past summer and the fact that the water table is normally high we arrived to find 2 inches of water in the house. We thought about abandoning the project and having to come back to it another time, but because the afternoon was going to be a little shorter we decided to tackle it. It was time to get messy! I do a great job of that with sloppy mud. At that site we moved about 250-300 cubic feet of slud (sluge mud - they name all the different kids of mud here). The one thing different about this project than Cedar Rapids is that in CR the muck stunk...here it does not stink, at least for the most part.

We came back to the camp a little early as we had the weekly local volunteer meeting. One of the local volunteers acts as the translator for the meeting. It was interesting to be a part of. We also elect a local volunteer of the week and they elect a "foreign" volunteer of the week. I found that to be really cool. To hear what the locals had to say and to see how proud the local is to get his award. We also celebrated birthday's for two of our local volunteers...complete with cake. Everyone seemed to enjoy the cakes that one of our "foreign" volunteers. After that we had a few minutes before the nightly foreign volunteer meeting. The meeting was usual HODR talk. We discuss water conservation, projects, issues and anything else that is brought up.

Tomorrow is our day off. I am not sure what I will do tomorrow. I am all for just chilling around here, maybe doing some reading and getting re-hydrated! I know I drank at least 6 nalgene bottles of water today, but I probably sweated most of that out!