Service Work, Day 1

Written by: Joshua Brown

Today was the start of our first day of service work in La Carpio. We had to wake up at 5:30 this morning, which was crazy. Breakfast was the same as yesterday, and we then enjoyed a nice drive to our destination. This was a huge culture shock for me personally because all of the houses were made of metal, and every house had bars to keep out people. Despite all of this, however, the people there seemed very nice.

For the first few hours we were in charge of moing dirt around to flatten out the ground so that we could later concrete them. This was a long job, but in the end we were all proud of our work. In addition, we worked with the locals to move the rocks and dirt around further down the path. During the course of just a few hours we covered the majority of a whole block, and this meant that we could begin to lay the concrete after lunch.

Lunch was a pretty fun time. We were given a hoagie, a bag of chips, and a piece of watermelon. This was okay, but the real fun started after we ate. There were a lot of little children running around the streets as we ate. Two kids were throwing around fruit as a bouncy ball, and eventually more kids came out. One child grabbed a basketball and began to kick it around, and soon everyone was involved. We played a small game of soccer with the locals, in which I personally scored 4 goals, and everytime someone scored everyone screamed. The kids were awesome. In fact, most of the kids were under the age of 10, the one kid was even 4 years old and he was still running around scoring goals. It was truly an amazing experience.

To top off the day we began to lay the concrete. We made the concrete ourselves, and in end we layed about a quarter block of concrete. We have full intentions of finishing tomorrow, and I hope that it doesn't disappoint. The main reason we stopped was a huge rain storm that hit. It began to downpour, and I am sure it is still raining now as we speak. This wasn't to bad, but it did cause some traffic.

Overall, today was a rather cool day. I can't wait to learn to salsa dance later, but I am sure that it will be an embarassment as expected. I am no dancer, nor do I ever intend to be. Well that is all for now, hope you all enjoy the pictures that are being uploaded. To find them, click the link on the far right page under "home".