Habitat

This week I started working with Habitat for Humanity. On Tuesday I was finally able to get more information about what I would be doing, as the woman that answered my emails before wasn't very helpful. The day started with a motorbike ride to the town of Olintepeque which is about 10km from the centre of Xela. The driver dropped my off at the house that was under construction. They put me to work right away. When I arrived the house had most of the walls up and they were then making the sloped section of the wall that meets the roof. The house is entirely made of concrete blocks and has a metal roof. We finished the roof on Thursday and it is a simple metal structure made of typical corrugated sheets. I would imagine that the house will get quite cold at night as usually there is no heat in Guatemalan houses. The house itself is quite simple 2 bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and living room but even after working on it for 3 days I am really getting to like it, and am looking forward to seeing it finish. There are 4 paid workers and the owner of the house was also working. I am the only volunteer at this time, although there was apparently a group from North Carolina that was working on it a couple weeks ago. Mostly I have been working as an unskilled labourer passing up concrete blocks, sheets of metal, concrete up to the workers on the roof who actually know what they are doing. It helps that I am tall and can reach quite high. It has been a bit of a problem knowing the names for various tools and so on in Spanish but usually it works out. Probably the hardest job was cutting the concrete blocks so that they would meet up flush with the sloped roof line. The only tool for the job was machetes. So it took quite a while to hack away at the concrete block using a dull blade. Often the block would crumble or break the wrong way so I would have to start again. The house is full of and surrounded by dust and dirt so I think that contributed to the cold that I have now, but I have a couple days off to recover. I will try to take a picture of it next week. The owner of the house and his wife are very nice, they made lunch for me the other day and I can see that they are getting quite excited to see that the house is almost finished.

I started taking salsa dance classes this week. So far I've had a couple of sessions and another one today. It has been pretty fun so far but still a bit of a challenge for me.