Work Days and Walt

We have had two great days of work here. Tuesday we went to the church camp to work on extending a retaining wall to keep the mud from sliding down the hill.  Mud had covered the foundation for this section since it was poured by Johnny Dye, Steve's brother.  We had to clear off the mud before we could start laying the base layer of the wall.   Walt proved at 53, he still has it.  A group of Pentecostals were having camp in the building above us and saw Walt.  They asked Walt to put his shirt back on because he was showing too much skin.  Pentecostal men do not go shirtless.

And then let's not forget the women of the group.  The Pentecostals also prayed for our women who wore pants.  I believe the verse is in 2 Lew 3 verses 1 and 2.  (We will be getting back to Lew in a second.)  Pentecost women wear skirts.  Actually, it brings attention to the fact of how careful you need to be in other countries and easy it is to offend other cultures without intending to do so.  Just ask the group about giving another Venezuelan the OK sign.  In Venezuela, that is calling a person a homosexual.

Squirrel! (Up movie reference). Back to camp.  The ladies sifted sand for the concrete.  Levi wheelbarrowed  the sand down to the concrete slab for us to mix up. After mixing the sand we hauled two buckets of concrete at a time to the wall.  I understand this isn't the way they always make the concrete, but it is not an uncommon way to do it.  Man, I have never sweat like I did Tuesday.  I now understand what it means to say I built this wall with my sweat as sweat poured off of my body into the concrete.

We broke for lunch and the rain came to cool us off.  The rain felt great.  I am sure to everyone else we looked like little kids playing in the rain.  It was incredibly refreshing.  It is amazing the amount of rain that pours down in a short amount of time.

And then the rains came.  Johnny mentioned that we are getting a taste of what they are up against when they are doing building projects.  In the morning, we had a great start to getting the first row of bricks done.

Did I mention the rain?  The rain washed mud back on top of our foundation and we had to remove that as well as irrigate the water away from our wall.  At the end of the afternoon, we did manage to finish about 2/3s of the wall.  We were all exhausted by the end of the day, but we managed to get in a great day of work.  Here is how we started the day...

...and how we finished.

 Did I mention Lew?

Did I mention Lew?  

Thank you for your prayers and support.  We still need to catch you up with yesterday's work around the Dye's place and complex and Walt eating 236 white glue thinking it was like Elmers.  

Choa (Ciao in Italian),

Ralph