Bolivia 2009

Well, I made it there and back. We showed up at the airport in Santa Cruz at about 8:00 pm on the evening of the 1st, found out our flight was delayed for about two hours, and after some sitting, we flew out at about 1:00 am the morning of the 2nd. After 7 hours of flight, we landed in Miami FL, where most of us went our separate ways. I managed to get a flight at 6:05 pm back to Denver, so I ended up sitting at the airport board out of my mind for 10 hours. Oh well, I had some books with me, so I did lots of reading.

Today we finished the last chunk of concrete for the basketball court! I wasn´t as busy today as I was the other days because there was no surface prep to do for the next day this time. When I was occupied, it was mostly hand-mixing concrete, and hauling wheelbarrows, so I´m pretty well covered in concrete. Last night we had a little worship service and devotional, and we did the mime drama that we weren´t able to do previously at the market before. After a short message from the bible, we had a little meeting to give a little history of Manos de Amor, or Hands of Love.

Here we are again. I´m still in Bolivia, and I´m still alive! Not much else to report. One more slab done, and one left. I worked on surface prep on the section we´re doing tomorrow, which is the last one. Work on the water tower was also started this afternoon. I described before how we don´t really have much machinery at our disposal for all this; the way the tower is being done is we have a plywood mold with re-bar inside, then set up a bucket brigade to pour concrete into it from the top.

Well, we´ve got one more slab poured for the basketball court. We have it divided into 4 sections and we´re pouring about one a day. I´m not sure exactly what the dimensions are, but Steve (guy sitting next to me) thinks it´s about 50´ X 30´. Yesterday when we got up in the morning, it had been raining so it was pretty cool out, and it was partly cloudy most of the day. That combined with the wind that gets stronger as the day goes on made for fairly comfortable working weather in the afternoon, but kind of chilly and windy in the evening.

Hello again readers! I have once again found internet. Let´s see, what is new today... At the moment, I´m in a little hole-in-the-wall internet cafe in Comarapa with another team member. Today we started pouring concrete for the basketball court, and leveling the ground where we weren´t pouring yet. We don´t have a concrete truck for any of this, so we are mixing most of the concrete by hand on the ground, plus one small electric mixer. I´ve lost count of how many wheelbarrow´s full of concrete I´ve moved today, but it should be pretty nice when we´re done.

Hello all who read this blog. I am now down in Bolivia, and have found a slow but working internet connection! We all managed to survive the plane rides and custums, aquired visas etc, then spent the night in  Santa Cruz, then took a bus up to Monte Blanco, which is the former Tambo MK school in the middle of nowhere. The bus ride from Santa Cruz to here actually ended up being about an hour longer than the flight from Miami to Santa Cruz, over very bad, and sometimes non-existent roads.