Day 3 Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Willy, Rick and Sydney shoveling gravel to make concrete
How rude of me! I failed on Day 1 to introduce our team to you and tell you where we are and which organization we are working with.
We are a short-term missions trip from Lawrence Free Methodist Church in Lawrence, KS, and are in the Dominican Republic doing some construction work for Kids Alive, an organization whose mission it is to help impoverished kids around the world. Kids Alive works in four areas in the DR. We are working in a community close to the northwestern shore, about three hours from Haiti.
There are sixteen of us on the trip. We range in age from 16 to 64, are 7 females and 9 males and work in different fields, but this week, we are all doing construction and are having a blast! We’re grateful for the construction workers on our team who can show us the ropes but are all pitching in to help build a block wall, mix concrete and fill a trench.
Cassandra shoveling gravel
By the end of today, our second day of work, our team had tied all the rebar, mixed the mortar and laid 600 blocks for a 100+ foot-long wall.
In a separate project, we mixed concrete made from 30 wheelbarrows of sand, 30 wheelbarrows of rocks and 3,000 pounds of cement. Then we moved all that concrete across the Kids Alive compound with wheelbarrows to pour it into a trench that was a two feet wide footing for a boundary wall, which we will start building tomorrow.
We’re grateful for the extremely hard-working local Haitians who helped us mix the concrete and are looking forward to another productive day tomorrow.
Many of our team members mixing concrete for the trench
Randy with a big smile on his face!
Sandy, one of our hard-working Haitian friends
A view of the trench after the concrete was poured
A view of the wall at the end of the day
Three of our team members wearing t-shirts donated to our team by Larry Wedman
Joy, Willy (from the DR) and Stephanie owned the concrete pile! These women shoveled almost the entire day! They rock!
Our team leader, Brian, and our cook, Zeneida
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