Trip day 5

My body is starting to feel all this hard work!  Today we had a house with quite a few kids running around, mostly the boys were brave enough to talk to us, but they sure had fun watching us, trying to talk to us, and having their picutres taken.  At one point we copied the rooster noises, then the kids started copying us.  We were doing all kinds of animals and seeing who could do it the best.  Then I groaned as I bent over to put some moartar in, and the kids started making that noise too!  I told them, no no, that is a Laura impression.  Then Dave stands up and goes, ¨Yea, Laura, ohhohhohh,¨ while holding his back.  Sad but true.  They all got a huge laugh out of that.  Jim had mentioned that at his site, they seemed to have a hard time saying Earl, the other half of his team, so they just yelled Jim all day.  That seemed to be the case at our site too, but my name was the easy name.  This did remember Krysta´s name at least, because at one point the little boys kept coming to the window saying, ¨Laura, Krysta, kisses!¨  They seem to like practacing their english on us, even though it seems to be limited to hello, goodbye, thank you, and you´re welcome.  That is much more than I have seen so far.  It was nice to have some fun kids or a change, makes the work more fun, and makes it easier to interact with the family.  Plus they did a lot of hard work or us!
The house we were in today was much more like what we were used to.  The house itself was made of cement, but very small and basic.  We were working in a stone kitchen with a dirt floor separate from the house, and it was very dark, covered in soot, and reeked of smoke even though there was no fire going.  Dave and Krysta spent some back breaking time trying to level the floor while I worked on mixing the moartar.  This family sifted all the sand for the mix, which took a while, looked very hard, and made it very hard to measure the sand exactly, because more was going next to the bucket than in it.  The first way they tried was to put it in a mesh potato bag and shake the heck out of the bag.  I helped with that a little, it took forever.  Then they came back with a box sifter and that went much better.  We rean into some issues later in the day where there weren´t enough bricks to finish the stove.  Too many had been broken and we were short one.  While we worked that issue out, we were mostly just sitting around.  It was very frustrating for us because, had it not been for that holdup, we would likely have finished the stove that day. Oh well, what are you going to do.  It´s probably better we didn´t finish just then, because that would have meant we had to carry the box of tools back with us, and I already had a hard enough time getting back up the steep slippery path in the rain.  Durying the day I slipped quite a few times but managed to stay upright, but I fell outright twice, making my hands and knees nice and muddy.  At least when I fell, I didn´t put my hands right in a pile of poo!  Today the sore muscles, rain, cold, and weird work schedules were getting to everyone, most of us were very upset about stopping early to go to the weavers demonstration.  In the end, I am glad we got to do it though.  The demonstration was canceled due to the rain, but we got a chance to buy some of the things these women were making.  It is sort of seeing the life cycle of the project here.  We build the stoves, the stoves make it much more efficient for the women to cook, so they have more free time to spend in their Ama women´s circle, the women´s circle teaches them new skills they can use to sell things, like tree sapplings, peanut butter, scarves, purses, tablecloths, etc.  Then they use this money to help better their family and boost their self esteem, heck, just having Ama want to help them, joining the women´s cirlce, and especialy having us come all the way from the US to build them stoves raises their self esteem.  So most of us bought a thing or two, and the items were labled with the name of the woman who made them.  I didn´t realize it at first, but that was so we knew who to pay, each woman handled her transactions separately.  Jim noted that the prices were a little higher than we could get at a market, but these were hand made, we were supporting the Ama project, and we got to thank personaly the women who made them.  Krysta and I got picutres with the women who made our items, well, one item for me, and the huge smile on their face was definately worth paying a little more.

There was no going out and partying for me once we got home.  I just wanted to get clean, get fed, and get to bed.  I was too tired and sore to even get up and get myself some tea, so Jim sweetly went and got me some.  Thank goodness we didn´t have any more presentations tonight, I definately would have fallen asleep!