Construction Adventure

My friend, Jen, came to me one day and asked if I wanted a day of adventure and intrigue. I said "Sure!" Well, that lead to a day of construction work.

There's a Christian compound called ELWA (Enternal Love Winning Africa) that has a hospital, school and guesthouses that usually homes short-term missionaries. And Mercy Ships is helping to build another guesthouse. So, here is my construction experience in pictures...

The crew is made of local "day workers." They have been trained in building the last year Mercy Ships was here. They come to work every day and leave with their daily wage. If they don't work, they don't get paid. So when it started to rain in the morning it was looking like they were not going to work that day. Fortunately the rain stopped around lunch time and the whole day was not wasted. While it was raining, Jen and I found ourselves on the covered porch of a nearby house. We quickly introduced ourselves to the people living there and thanked them for the shelter from the rain.

The recipe for cement; a wheelbarrow of sand, a bag of cement, and water. Mix, apply to bricks and let bake in the African sun at 100 degrees until hard and dry.

This is me being a mason, building a brick wall. The workers didn't let us do this for very long, we were slowing them down. Don't let this picture fool you, no matter how good I look I'm sticking to being a nurse.

After a long, hard day of work the crew leaders wanted us to get the whole African experience and treated us to a traditional African meal of roasted fish and rice from a community bowl...interesting.



It had teeth!