Thursday, April 6, 2017
Jesus Christ's birthday.
Hiked down Boundary 1 to levels 1 &. 2 and visited the hand-dug well. Don is
fascinated with its construction. Every thing is going very well at all 3 sites. Then we
went to Hill Top. I was pooped and did not go down. They are bending steel to go into
the concrete and that just doesn't seem like something I need to kill myself over. I will
go down when there is some real progress being made and there is something to see.
While Don was there, there was a woman sitting at the site in queue with her jeri can
to get water and she had a bucket of large homemade butterscotch balls on her head.
Don asked her about them and they were 2 for 500 leones. ($.03 each) Don bought the
whole bucket and told her to pass them out to all the men and to be sure to give at
least 2 to every man carrying 80# bags of cement on their heads down the mountain to
the work site. It was a bucket-brigade style process. One man carried a bag 25 yards
and handed it off to the next guy and went back up to get another bag. And all the way
down the mountain they did this. Really HARD work. Below are some pictures of
people harvesting rocks. They take very large rocks and cook charcoal on top of them
to crack them and then using a hammer, they break the large rocks into small rocks.
They make varying sizes of rocks depending on the size ordered. As you can see many
of them are women and they bring their babies with them. They work all day in the sun
and they seem to be happy. Lots of smiles, laughing and talking. This is a way of life
and they don't know any different so they find joy in their day.
We took the men donuts and peanuts. They were so happy.