Let me begin by saying what a great group of students we
have with us this year. Although
everything hasn’t gone according to plan, there has been no complaining. We started with breakfast at 6:00am, and nearly
everyone was early or just on time.
That’s tremendous, especially considering that there are 4-6 persons per
room, and only one shower/bathroom per room! Breakfast was again (and will be most mornings) “Gallo Pinto”,
which is rice and beans as well as scrambled eggs and fruit. The fruit was fresh pineapple and watermelon.
After breakfast, we all headed to the school and unloaded a
long flatbed trailer of 20 ft metal tubing and cement. We all worked as a team, and got it
unloaded. The bags of cement were about
100 lbs each, and there were 30 of them.
After we unloaded those, the truck pulled down below the project on a
side road, and the students unloaded about 300 cement blocks from the street below up
over a retaining wall to where we will be building the perimeter fence.
After unloading the block, the students moved the brush that
had been cut down to make way for the wall/fence that we are building. Also during the day, they moved another stack
of 500 blocks to a new location to make room for the dump truck to deposit the
load of sand we will use tomorrow in the concrete for the footing for the
wall/fence.
The students did an AMAZING amount of work for our first day! There is more to tell, but once again
everyone has gone to bed for the night. And several were probably asleep as soon as
their heads hit the pillow from a long day of hard work. I’ll say it again: This is really a great group of students!
Thanks for your prayers!
-Michael Peel