What a week!

November 2nd, 2009 by pierre myrand

Mixing crushed brick with water to get "barra" a sort of cement

Rebuilding of the wall by Ingrid and Marco, our boss

Kids having fun with ther wheelbarrow I bought with donation money

Peter from UK, Ingrid from Hong Kong, Rich from Colorado and Marco

: Demolishing the wall to move it by 6 feet

Louis on the left and Ismael on the right

Classroom in Chensayhuno

Donation of the school supplies given to me in Montreal by pharmacy

First, on the construction side, four of us volunteers have been working at demolishing a wall made of mud bricks and some form of stucco to move it 6 feet to the right or left depending on where you stand. As we were demolishing the wall, we were trying to preserve as many mud bricks as possible so as to rebuild the wall. Unfortunately, we only achieved a 40% saviour rate. The rejected and broken bricks ended up outside the class room and onto the side of the soccer field in a huge heap. This heap of huge and very hard chucks of mud bricks was to be converted in “barra” or liquid mud. This barra is to be used to “cement” the mud brick as mortar would do in our countries. For the past three days three of us have been in charge of the three steps necessary to make barra: 1) the crushing stage where Richard would use a pick and break-up coarse pieces of the mud bricks, 2) the crushing stage (mine in fact) where I would take Rich’s coarse grind and with the back side of one of the new shovels I bought with all the donations I raised, along with a second one and a wheelbarrow (what would we have done without that fundamental tool? I do not know! But yes I know: we would have carried all of the 2 to 3 tons of material in 5 gallon buckets! Can you imagine!!!), and 3) my grinded material what put in a heap, water was added and, as with traditional wine making, with stepping and mixing this slurry with Ingrid’s and Abbey’s feet would generate the right consistence barra “cement” to be used by Marco our construction manager and brick layer. What a job! As of this Friday, the wall is 60% of the way up with the work to resume on Tuesday as Monday is a national holiday.

Rich and I soon realized that we did not need to cover 100% of our heap of broken mud bricks into “barra”. So what did we do the whole morning? With our new wheelbarrow we removed 1.5 tons of broken mud bricks from our heap to what seems like a “garden area” 100 feet away from that heap. Both Rich and I taking turns at the wheelbarrow where huffing and puffing after only 100 feet of wheeling the full wheelbarrow. Remember that we are doing this at 3,800 meters! Well sure enough, we managed to remove the whole heap; yes, yes, yes!

On a more rewarding way, I did go shopping for all sorts of items like soccer balls, a volleyball, plastic dump truck and pails, shampoo, sun screen lotion, soap, tooth paste, towels for the kids to use in the new showers that we will finish in two weeks from now, toilet bowls, ceramic tiles for the same showers, beads for three orphanages, etc. All of this bought with the close to $3,600 raised from friends and family.

Once again to all of you donors, many, many thanks. You cannot imagine what your donations permit. In fact, your donations allow things to happen. Without this kind of money, the projects just do not move ahead…

Finally, I had the immense privilege and pleasure to go the organizations to give some of the purchases and to meet the children that would benefit from these gifts. Wow! You should see the smiles and the faces of these disadvantaged children.

Well, it is all for now. Tomorrow Saturday, I will go climbing a mountain near Tambomachai, an Inca ruin.

To all of you that I miss in Montreal, take care.