We've got water!

I'm sitting on the front porch with a torrential downpour coming down, waiting for dinner and writing the daily team blog. The rain came early today; usually it's later in the evening. Today was another good day in Haiti. First thing this morning, half of the team went to install a concrete floor in a home in the same community we went to market yesterday. Jean-Jean and Kristi are pretty excited about this program. Apparently this was floor 338. They were seeing a lot of problems with worms in the surrounding communities and just eliminating dirt floors in these homes has made a drastic difference in the number of cases of worms. It's was definitely neat to be able to go to someone's home, help them clear out their few belongings, and then begin prepping the floor for concrete. Some levelling, string lines spanning across the home's four rooms, and then fillling in the low spots to allow for about 1.5-2 inches of concrete. No real recipe for mixing concrete, just as long as it has a mix of all of the ingredients: sand, gravel, cement mix, and water. Good thing it's only a floor, not structural I guess. Passing buckets of concrete from the front yard down the line to the back of the house, the new floor started to take shape. Andres and I left before the floor was complete so we could go back to our well project. We took it all apart again to fit in a different restrictor. Working late into the morning under the midday scorching sun, we managed to put it all back together again before a late lunch. (A quick fast forward: we just ventured out into the rainstorm to hook up the generator to the well -- we were waiting for the dental clinic to finish with the generator. We hooked up and got water flowing! The tanks are finally filling up. Thank you Lord! Now we just need the power to come back on so the pump can run on its own;) After lunch, some of the team helped Kristi teach English at the primary school. When school was over, we split up into pairs to walk some of the 2-3 grade students home. Meandering through the fields over cactus-hedged paths, we made our way to Idy's home. His father spoke excellent English. He serves as a pastor of a rural church and the director of a widows and orphans ministry. Living along the main road, his wife is able to have a small shop, selling basic necessities to neighbours and travellers. Iby quickly changed out of his school uniform and joined us as we headed to Steve's home. We tried to make some small talk with his mother, showing her pictures of my girls and accepting a quick tour of her home. Iby, Steve, and a cousin walked us back to UCI, but not without stopping to pick some mangoes for each of us. Those little boys have amazing throwing arms, using rocks to knock mangoes down from 40ft up in the air. We have all been missing fresh fruits and vegetables in our diets, so we thoroughly enjoyed a few slices of fresh mangoes for dessert tonight. After our walk, I headed back over to Cana Village to see what happening there. Sometimes it seems there are a lot of people sitting around, but seeing them working under the scorching afternoon sun and how much they get done, it's obvious that Haitians are definitely hard workers. I quickly got roped into helping with the concrete work, taking wheelbarrows of freshly mixed concrete to set the rebar posts. One of the women put a bucket in my hands and asked to join her to fetch water from the well for mixing concrete. Crossing through a couple gates and through an elderly woman's yard, she was sleeping on her front perch on our first trip and preparing dinner on a second trip. Filling our buckets at the hand pump, I helped the ladies get their 5 gallong buckets on their head, which they gracefully carried back to the constuction site while I followed them, awkwardly switching my heavy bucket from hand to hand. With all the posts set and the day's work done, I headed back to UCI to check out the dental clinic in operation. I felt sorry for the guy getting a root canal, but know he is blessed to have Isabelle and her team save one of his front teeth. My real motive, of course, was checking how soon I could steal the generator to test our pump.