This morning Nancy popped into the computer room (I was attempting to fix last nights blog) and went 'psst' and waved me over to show me monkeys playing on the roof of the dining hall. We alerted the rest of the group and hunkered down for some monkey watching (they are not baboons but are velvet monkeys). Turns out they were really into the attention and several stopped to strike a pose for all the cameras, there were big ones, small ones, black and white but no colored ones ;)
I know that was lame but even worse was when Tadeo tried to explain that they could jump so far from branch to branch without fear of falling because they never lose their balance and someone said, "so of a monkey fell in the forest would anybody hear it?"- groan
We arrived and immediately helped to construct another set of scaffolds for another outside wall, again it was made by using a machete to chop off branches of nearby trees. Tadeo can wield a pretty mean machete!
When the chopping was done Vera posed for some pretty fun machete shots too.
I made my own scaffold using bricks and branches on one of the walls and Barb made one on her side with bricks and a 2 x 4 and we were in business.
Robin was back today - I really love working with him - he is a pretty tiny 55 ish man with a smile that lights up his whole face. He inspects our row of bricks and then says 'very nice' and gives me a thumbs up. Today we discovered he knows quite a bit more than 'very nice' as we had a bit of a mix up on the row and he counted from 1 to 12 in perfect English to determine the error! Then, he looked at me winked and high fived me, soooo funny.
Laxon spent the entire day working on the tapered peak of the one wall that we finished up yesterday - we are so close to that level on the opposite wall too. (maybe rafters tomorrow)
Babie's boss showed up right near quitting time in a shiny silver chrysler and we joked that it must be the building inspector... she was very personable.
The kids were most enthralled in the car...on hands and knees looking under it.
Once again they loved the skipping rope, soccer balls and the little rubber bouncy balls. They are even getting so comfortable with us that they reached right in to the van for the skipping rope - cheeky little darlings. They are talking to us a lot more this week too.
Totally exciting to see that our bricks are truly becoming a house...we have developed our own language for the bricks in our time here and have become quite brick snobs, in fact.
There are 2 main categories of bricks:
pretty bricks - for the exterior of the house - 2 types - long pretty and short pretty
shitty bricks - for interior walls - 2 types - OK shitty and really shitty...really shitty never make the walls. We also require 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 bricks and often they originated as a shitty brick.
Occasionally on the ride home, we will see a pile of bricks and utter, 'hmm those are some good looking bricks'.
It was super windy today and we ate our lunch in the van to spare our food from the layer of orange dirt that covers everything. At first the breeze was very welcome but then it picked up and got a bit much...hair, dirt and mud alternated hitting our sunglasses.
Two groups of Scotties have joined the lodge and the group from Edinburgh are quite fantastic - they actually managed to find a pub on Sunday and watch the world cup and we heard them return at midnight loud and clear - turns out they are so adorable that we couldn't hold it against them. They are here visiting a sister school that their school has partnered with. They were playing a very fun game of "ultimate vortex" when we got back today.
Synopsis - two teams of 3 players facing each other about 30 feet apart.
each team takes turns chucking the vortex (football like) at each other - teams earn a point if they strike the opponent in the head or crotch.
If a player flinches their team loses a point. First team to 15 points wins...very entertaining - oh to be 17 and 18 again!
Only one more full day of work - hard to believe our time here has nearly expired - Tadeo has collected our email addresses tonight so that he will be able to give us a post trip follow up of Grandma and the kids, as well as several of the other children that our group has really bonded with.
