Saturday - Day 6

Well, we'd been pleased and amazed at how mild (relatively) the temperatures had been, and how much the cloud cover helped.  Then Mr Murphy found us today... :)

 Now, this was in the sun... we think it was really more like 41 or so in the shade ... like that makes a lot of difference though.. :)  The breeze coming in through the window mid-afternoon literally felt like the blast of dry heat you get when you open the door of a hot oven...  It has cooled down a bit now, but as you can tell from our Chia Pet Convention photo, even at 9:00 pm it's still warm:

Despite the heat, it was back to work day.  We started the day off with a dawn walk along the canal.  There is a lot that happens around here at that time of day.  Men line up on the bridge near the compound before light with their tool(s) to wait and hope to be picked up for a day's work in the fields or brush as laborers.  Some get picked up for the day, others don't.  They all go back and do the same thing the next day.  We also got to walk along the canal and see farmers at work in the fields, people making their way to or from work, or walking horses or donkeys laden with produce.  We ran into three boys (maybe in their teens) carrying their hoes to work today... what was really odd was that one of them was listening to an MP3 music player as they walked...

A lot of the work focused on trying to finish the walls for the apartment and get the remaining posts poured.  We ran short on cement blocks (we've already used 2000 or so) and didn't quite finish off the walls, and there are a couple of large posts remaining, but we're getting close.  A lot of the prep work for the headers that support the roof was accomplished as well.  Jim and Peter spent the morning digging (chipping may be a better description - the ground here is super hard!) for new footings and eventually a floor where the stairs were added.  This will also support one of the main new posts that we need to finish preparing on Monday.

We also received a large truckload of building materials at the end of the day - 500 more blocks, and a large collections of 4x4 supports and steel jack posts we'll be using when we get ready to pour the roof.  As Bob noted, we are lucky to be getting a steady flow of material - especially here in Haiti.

There are a lot of smaller projects all happening in parallel too.  Often there isn't room or need for the entire team to work on the apartment, but there are always multiple other projects going on.  The other day Bob, Jim, and Brian Bowers took apart and cleaned all the connections and terminals for the array of car batteries that the house runs on when the generator and local power aren't running/available:

(Jim's starting to wonder how we always manage to get his best side in these shots... better ones below...)
There have been many repairs going on (showers, cabinets, etc.) and new projects like rerouting the exhaust for the diesel generator, removal of the old generator to allow us to block the generator room in and further reduce the noise, working on school benches, and assembling wheelbarrows.  Here are a few shots of Brian Roberts, Leonard, and Peter on some of these projects - what's really nice is that some of the older boys (Vladimy - 14, and JJ - 8) were able to lend a hand with some of the projects too:

Vladimy spent some time with Jim and his camera a bit today and loved it.  Here's a shot Jim took of Vladimy, and one Vladimy took of Jim with Dieunel:

Most of the kids are happy to have their photo taken, but they love to see the results:

Alex (or Ti Luck) is thriving on all the playing and attention he's been able to enjoy lately.  He's really taken to Deux (as in Brian 2 - Brian Bowers):

Today we also finished organizing a lot of the donations and distributed them to the kids here at the orphanage.  Kate helped to lead a lot of this, measuring the kids' feet (by tracing them on paper) and gathering potential fits, along with Heidi.