Getting my hands dirty

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

Somehow it is already Tuesday afternoon. I am somewhere far out in the countryside of Peru, about 2 hours from Cusco by van. We are at the home of one of the children that goes to school at the Albergue helping to build an oven in their home. It is early afternoon and we are all taking a lunch/relax break so I thought I’d lie here in the sun and write a bit more about the trip and about yesterday.

On a slightly funny note, I don’t have any paper with me to write on. I dug around in my back pack and found some sheets of paper that actually ended up being a receipt from the Oriental hotel restaurant in Bangkok dated July 2, 2005. Apparently the group of us spent 14936.13 Thai Baht for dinner and James put it on his credit card. The Amex number and expiration date are both clearly printed on the bottom of the third page of the receipt – he’s lucky I’m a nice person or I could have some shopping fun with this ;)

Anyway, yesterday (Monday) was our first real work day. We woke up at about 7:00am and had breakfast of tea and bread. We then went outside to begin building a wash area for the hostel. The children currently do all of their wash in tubs that they must carry to the side of the Albergue and fill with water – one tub to wash and one to rinse. The wash area that we are building is complete with drainage and will in some small way make their everyday life a little easier.

My first job was to load rocks from a rock pile into a wheel barrel and haul them to the wash area. Jacy, Brian and I completed our 4 loads pretty quickly and then went to help arrange them in the dug out area that we would later cement. With help from our contractor we figured out how to arrange the drainage pipe and what area needed to be dug out to lay it in. We all took turns digging and shoveling out the dirt. When the area was just about ready it was time to make the cement. Nothing about that process was fun. First, Jacy, Alice and I had fill 12 wheel barrels full of 2 different kinds of dirt and rocks and then make trips hauling it to the wash area. Cement was added to the pile and then we all had to take turns shoveling the huge pile of dirt from one area to the next in order to get it all mixed up. Finally we had to add water and, using a pick and shovels, manage to mix it into the correct consistency for cement. We all took a lot of ‘catch your breath’ breaks and I could feel muscles aching that I didn’t even know I had.

Once the cement was a heavy, wet consistency we could start shoveling it onto our wash area over the rocks we had placed earlier. I swear it said in the Globe Aware information that we would not be doing manual labor like digging ditches…hmmm…

As we filled in the area 2 people in the group began smoothing it out with wooden boards. I will say the area we got done looks great – too bad we only had enough cement for about half the area! Guess we know what we’ll be doing on Wednesday morning…

At about 4pm we started to clean up as the sun goes down about 5pm and it gets pretty cold pretty quickly at that point. Jacy and I took cleanup duty while the others went to plan for the hour with the children that we were having from 5-6pm. Unfortunately that hour with the kids ended up not being particularly organized and really only ended up being about 30 minutes of a game to practice their English. At least I got to practice my Spanish at the same time!

After the game we all went inside to take quick showers. All of us were pretty ready to head into Cusco central for a nice evening and a few cocktails. Jacy, Alice and Tami wanted to shop before dinner. Brian, Brian and I went into a nice little British pub for a beer instead! Dinner was at a little Peruvian restaurant on Plaza de Armas called Pattiti. I went with the local specialty of guinea pig. It was okay – there wasn’t really much meat on it although they were kind enough to serve me the whole body, head and all.

We went through numerous bottles of wine and everyone was feeling pretty happy when we finally exited the restaurant. An excellent time to go grocery shopping, right? The market across the street turned into a field day for all of us as we loaded up on snacks and bottles of wine and Pisco. I went to look for Mate de Coco and found Lipton Yellow Label tea instead! 3 boxes – 150 tea bags – made it into my cart. It is pretty funny to look at the piles of snacks and groceries that we all bought.

Knowing that we were leaving at 8am the next morning forced us to finally head back to the Albergue for some sleep. While it was a very long day it was such a good one. I’m not particularly a fan of getting dirty and doing outside labor, but there is such a sense of accomplishment with that kind of work. I even kind of enjoyed the aches and pains that I was feeling because it felt rather therapeutic to have worked my body so hard, and for such a good cause. It is also so nice to have the group that we have this week on the program. Everyone is getting along so well, and we all really had a nice evening together.

Today (Tuesday) has been an interesting and odd day so far. Tami and Brian got up at 6:30 to go to the airport because their luggage was supposed to finally be coming in. Unfortunately it did not make it. Jacy, Alice and I got up around 7:30 and went down for breakfast. We are fast learning that ‘we are leaving at 8’ means ‘you should probably be ready by 8:15 or 8:30 and we may leave by then’. We climbed into the van to head to the country around 8:30 and settled in for what turned out to be a miserable 2 hour drive. The roads were one lane and unpaved the whole way. The dust and dirt that the van stirred up infiltrated the vehicle and made it hard to breath. My ipod wheel was gritty to turn and I kept having to wipe off the layer of dirt that settled on it. I know that none of us are looking forward to the ride back.

We got here to the middle of nowhere in the hills of Peru around 10:30am. The itinerary for the day is to build an oven for the family of Luis, one of the children at the school. The first thing we had to do was carry some big mud bricks down the hill. I’m apparently a wimp because I made it about ¾ of the way and then had to hand my brick over to Brian to take the rest of the way. I felt better about myself when I saw Jacy and Alice coming down the hill carrying one between them, but that quickly went away when I saw little Luis carrying two by himself.

Once we had carried down the bricks we realized that in fact the entire home was made of those mud bricks. It was explained to us that the clay, water and straw mixture will last about 20 years and that most of the homes in the poorer areas of Peru are made this way. The mud mixture is used to make everything from walls to, well, the oven that we were building. So our next task was to make some of the clay mixture. Tami and Brian volunteered to mix the mud in the traditional way – with their bare feet. Alice went about taking pictures. Jacy and I sat on the hill watching and cheering them on while soaking up some sun…

We made up for it a little later when all of the wood had to be cut to create the structure that would hold the clay. As we were taking turns sawing away with a little hand saw I couldn’t help but think how nice it would be to have one of my dad’s power tools at that moment. I guess it is all in what you know, and this life is so foreign to someone who is used to having so much.

It was just crazy to be a part of building this oven. The kitchen that we were building it in was a one room building that housed the stove and cooking supplies on one side and guinea pigs on the other. I won’t lie, it grossed me out a bit to see these little rodents running around the kitchen. But the family raises them to sell because they make ‘a lot’ of money from them as they are a delicacy. Having eaten one last night I have to disagree that they are such a fabulous food, but that is beside the point.

The oven base and chimney was made from cutting down trees setting them up to resemble a chimney. Small branches were then cut and tied on to intermittent nails. I asked why they didn’t just nail in each piece the way I would have expected, and it was because nails are too expensive to use that many of. The twine is cheaper and can be used to secure the branches using a third or a fourth of the number of nails. Once this base was created and the chimney structure was in place it was time to throw the mud. We all grabbed handfuls of the mud/straw mixture and threw it at the structure so that it would stick. When there was enough mud on there it was smoothed out and any gaps were filled in. The only thing about this stove that was not made completely from the natural resources in the immediate area was the clay cooking base that we had brought with us. This was bought using our volunteer money and that, along with our time, allowed this family to have a stove/chimney in their kitchen rather than essentially cooking over a bonfire right in the house. They showed us the ceiling and walls to point out the black soot from having an open fire in the home, and it was explained that this was so appreciated because the smoke would actually go up and out of the kitchen now.

As we were packing up to go there were hugs all around. In my everyday life I work long hours in an office and I stress about things like fonts on power point presentations. Here, in just a few hours, I was a part of a team that changed a family’s day to day existence for the better. My fingernails are covered in mud (and I don’t want to think about what was in that mud, considering the number of animals running around and the fact that there is nowhere to sit on the ground that is safe from some sort of animal crap), my clothes are probably ruined between the cement and mud etc, my face is supremely sunburned, and yet all I can think is that it was such a good day. I came here hoping to gain some fresh perspective on a life that has at times gotten away from me. It has only been a few days, but I already know that this is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself and that I will never forget this trip.

The trip back as been as bad as we all feared, but thankfully we are almost there. My ipod battery died about 30 minutes ago, which gave me some time to finish up this little report on the day. I have a feeling we are all going to be eating dinner and heading to bed pretty early. After all, we need to be refreshed and ready to mix more cement tomorrow...