Honduras - Day 4 - We kept working.

As Tuesday morning began, I once again woke up much earlier than both me and my alarm wanted me to. David was once again getting up early to take four more youth to milk cows. Part of me felt bad each morning watching him get out of bed an hour before I did to walk up the hill to the barn and stand in manure for half an hour, but he was enthusiastic about it and I had milked cows before, so most of me didn't mind.


We all repeated our routine from Monday morning, eating breakfast, changing clothes, putting on bug spray, filling our water bottles, and, thankfully, applying layers of sun screen. I didn't notice the sun during our seven hours of work on Monday, but the 20 minutes playing frisbee in an open field lit my neck on fire.


Going into our work day, we knew we had a huge project to work on during the morning hours. The second porch at the two homes I had worked at the first day needed to be completely filled with concrete. Since it took five of us working for three and a half hours to complete the slightly smaller porch the morning before, we gathered a team of five of our strongest guys to work on the job.


After we arrived at the village to another heartfelt welcome, we divided into our groups and went to our work sites. I hate that I can't speak for all of the groups since I was only at mine, but all of the work we did was tough and meaningful.


As my group approached our homes, we were greeted by a new group of men from the village, none of whom I had worked with the day before. This was slightly disappointing to me since I had begun to work very well with Carlos and Alex the previous day, but it was the nature of the job, so I continued to work hard no matter who was next to me.


We soon found out that we would have to complete an interior room in the house before we started working on the porch. The floor was very deep in this room, so before we could start mixing concrete, we first had to carry buckets of dirt to help even the floor and also to help save concrete mix. After half an hour of spreading dirt across the floor in a semi-even layer, we began mixing concrete in double and triple batches for the remainder of the morning.


Within an hour and a half or so, we had finished the interior room and started working to fill the large porch. I knew we wouldn't be finished by lunch time, but we all worked as quickly as we could hoping that we would somehow manage to finish before our meal arrived. Between the five Americans and the five or six men from the village that we worked with, we finished about two-thirds of the porch before lunch.


As our work progressed, we found out that the house we were working on was Daisy's, the leader of the village. It struck me that the leader of the village lived in a mud-brick home without concrete floors, but I was quick to realize that it's the people that make the home, not the homes that make the people. We worked that morning with Daisy's 20 year old son, her 16 year old brother, and a few other men that may or may not have been family.


As we started to break for lunch, we thought we should help them finish before we left, but we were shooed away by the men. They told us it was better for us to take our break than to keep working, that they would keep working while we ate. While I appreciated their kindness and willingness to work around the schedule HOI had set for us, I wanted to see this porch completed.


After a lunch of seasoned beef (BEEF!), rice, tortillas, and more refreshing, glass-bottles of Coke, we decided to change some of our work groups. I traded with one of the girls who had not yet mixed concrete and a few of the guys traded to take some pressure off of our tired backs from a day and a half of nothing but concrete work.


Being able to work at a new house that afternoon was exciting for me. It was a further walk from the soccer field than the houses I had been working at, but I didn't mind seeing more of El Rodeo. As we approached the house, I saw a raised chicken coop with a large pig and several piglets laying in the dirt below.


We walked behind the house and there were two men working on a latrine. One of the men was Julio, the craftsman I had worked with the day before. They were trying to find boards to cover the hole of the latrine that we would later cover with concrete. As they worked on this, I sat on the back porch with the two youth I would be working with for the afternoon.


The daughter of the woman who lived at this home came out and sat between us. She had a plastic Barbie-type doll in her hand and a bowl of water. After taking a drink from the water, she went over to the family's outdoor bath tub and grabbed a bar of soap. She then proceeded to thoroughly wash her doll's hair with more than enough soap. And then she broke her doll in half.


Seeing a tiny Honduran girl snap a plastic doll, whom she had just shown love for by washing her hair, was hilarious to the three of us sitting there with no work for us to be done at the moment.


One of the girls I was with spoke a little more Spanish than I did by this point, so every few minutes she would say one or two words asking if there was something we could do. The man I didn't know was very kind and told us we could keep our seats.


After several minutes sitting and watching them work, they asked us to help them put posts up around where their new latrine would sit. They had a huge chainsaw to cut the posts with, after measuring things closely of course. Once they had the correct posts cut, they would level the posts and fill in the holes around them with dirt. They first handed one of the youth a long poll to stamp the dirt around the post, but after a few hard pats with the poll, Julio called my name and flexed his muscles towards me. He wanted me to take over since I was stronger.


When Julio flexed, his bicep literally bulged from his arm like it was trying to jump high into the air. Me and Carolyn, one of the youth I was working with, glanced at each other in amazement when he did this. He was asking for me because I was strong and he was this built? I'm still baffled by the people of El Rodeo.


After getting the posts secured in the ground, it was time to mix concrete to cover the large hole that had been dug for the latrine. We counted out 80 shovels of dirt, I carried over a bag of concrete mix, and we started working.


By this point on day two of working in the village, almost all of us had mixed concrete more times than we cared to think about. The three of us started working flawlessly together and had a batch of concrete ready in no time.


Pouring the concrete onto the top of the latrine was much quicker than it was pouring it in the rooms and porches I had worked on previously. Since this concrete did not need to be flat or level, we dumped our buckets quickly and went back to refill them. It wasn't five minutes after the concrete had been finished mixing that we had carried the entire batch over to the latrine.


As we finished this batch, three of the members of our group who had gone back to work on finishing the porch from the morning arrived at our house. They had finished the porch and came to see what they could do to help us. The six of us quickly mixed another batch of concrete and carried it over to finish covering the latrine.


Right as we finished, one of the men selected me, David, and one of our stronger youth to go work on another project. We had never been selected so directly until now, so we were all nervous that we would be working on a very difficult project.


After we had been picked, Daisy led us away from house and down the path. She stopped before we got back to the main road and ducked through the barb-wire fence on our right, as if she were stepping through the ropes of a wrestling ring. We all laughed at the thought of the three of us following her through the wire even though we knew we all had to get through somehow.


David tried to go between the middle two wires with his backpack on and in the process caught both his backpack and the crotch of his scrubs in the fence. After seeing this, me and Isaac, the youth we were with, decided to crawl under the bottom wire. Thankfully, all three of us made it through without a scratch.


After Daisy led us back to the two houses with the larges porches, we put our backpacks down and our work gloves on, thinking there was more work to be done at this house. But then she told us to follow one of the men who we had been working with on the latrine project. With every step we took, we wondered what job was in store for us. We saw a pile of logs in the distance and hoped we wouldn't be carrying them in the hot sun.


The man who led us had a hammer and a small, black plastic bag in his hand. He led us away from the home and down the road we drove in on every day. We joked about how scary this situation was, being let into the woods by a man with a hammer, but our jokes were made to cover up our wondering minds about what job was waiting on us.


As the man led us away from the village, we started up the side of a hill. We weaved in and out of bushes and weren't sure where we were going. Finally, we saw the frame of a house standing on top of the hill.


Two other men soon met us at the house and we started holding boards for the men while they nailed wall planks to the frame. This was the easiest job we had done yet, but also the hottest. We were on top of a hill with nothing to shade us from the hot Honduran sun. And we had left our backpacks far away at Daisy's house not knowing we would be going to another home to work.


As I held up tall planks from the inside of the soon-to-be house, the man who we had followed looked through one of the large gaps and said, "Brian?" This brought a smile to my face and I said, "Si." By this point, I had started to remember my basic Spanish and asked his name. This was Johnny.


After taking turns with David and Isaac holding boards for the two men with hammers, we were beginning to feel the effects of the hot sun. The work day was almost over, so we decided to call it quits and head back for a drink of water and a spot under a tree.


After we had gathered our bags and headed back with the rest of the group, we saw that the group of veterinarian students who were staying at the ranch had come to our village to spay and neuter animals. They mostly operated on dogs, but they had just finished castrating a horse.


I wasn't there to see it, but apparently one of the female vets had just thrown a horse testicle at one of our youth and hit him in the chest with it. I was more disgusted than angry, but reactions around the group were varied. Thankfully, the youth who was hit took the situation in stride and reacted very maturely.


After we had calmed down from this incident, we refilled our water bottles and boarded the vans to head back to the ranch. On Monday afternoon, we were still filled with excitement and had the energy to play frisbee and soccer, but after our second day of work, we were all exhausted and ready to head back home for the night.


We all showered and got ready for dinner and a few of the youth going to play soccer with the ranch staff before dinner. We went to dinner a little early this evening to get in a few games of Bananagrams before it was time to eat. I don't normally like Scrabble or Words With Friends, but Bananagrams has the competitiveness to make it fun for me, even if I only win occasionally.


After having beef for lunch, we were back to chicken, beans, rice, and tortillas for dinner, but it was still delicious after our long days of work in the sun. After dinner, we played a few more games of Bananagrams and then headed back to our dorms for our devotion.

Two of our girls led the devotion this night. They had us go around and talk about our highs and lows from the day that was. I can't remember what else we discussed, but I know it was a good discussion. These are the times when I wish I had kept writing in my journal.

After our devotion, we had a few quick announcements and then the youth opened letters from the children of the church and another one of our youth advisors.

We spent this evening on the porch again, swinging in hammocks and joking with one another. Around 9pm, Tara had gone into our room to start getting ready for bed. She quickly walked out of our door and in a frantic voice said, "Brian. There is a frog in our room." I laughed, but jumped up promptly to help her, with several youth in tow wanting to see how big and where this frog had found itself.

The frog was under one of the spare beds in our room. It was a pretty big frog and had gotten itself in a corner and couldn't figure out how to find the door. After a few minutes moving beds and waving a towel at it, the frog hopped out the door and our first crisis of the week was averted.

We all went back onto the porch for awhile, still giggling at Tara's plea for help, but were soon all headed to bed. Within minutes of everyone leaving the porch, there was a knock on our door. One of our girls had gotten sick.

We all put our shoes back on and went on to the porch as quickly as we could to see what was going on. Thankfully, we think it was a bit of dehydration mixed with not eating enough throughout our tiresome days in the village. After an hour or so sitting with her to make sure she was okay, and a very kind visit from the ranch doctor, we sent her to bed and she was fine by the morning.

We were four days into our trip and we had only dealt with one tiny moment of sickness. We were all very thankful for this, especially after hearing doctors tell us about bouts with travelers diarrhea and other stomach issues. The group that had been at the ranch the week before us had 13 or their 16 members get sick, so I was hoping our fate wouldn't turn out similarly.

Though we were up a couple hours longer than we wanted to be making sure everyone was taken care of, we were glad that things were okay and we would still be able to get a decent night's sleep.