Day Two: Mixing it Up

Today we all worked hard. We built a house, or what felt like a house. We prepare for and poured a concrete floored slabs for the second story floor,first storey room, of two houses within the community of Cuatro (just across from the Children's home). The girls did the back breaking work of spinning the wire to reinforce the slap, before we began mixing the concrete. The boys laboured, doing muscly stuff to get the move bags of sand, blue metal gravel and concrete down an uneven dirt path of 60m which was slippery and sludgy due to rain. In the end we realised lots of the girls are stronger than the boys.

 We rotated in our three groups, with two doing the construction while the other team got to slack off (not really, it was actually intense) with the kids from the children's home, playing soccer, blowing bubbles, giving piggy back rides and going up to the nursery to cuddle and look after the toddlers.A break for lunch meant more of Marilou and the other wonderful ladies in the kitchen's deliciously scrumptiously fabulous lunch, which "was better than any if my Mum's cooking ever - Jesse Pleysier", although I am sure he meant no offence to his mum.

After a short rest, we continued construction while one of the team took the Children's Home kids to the pool for a swim. With only one pour left to finish the slaps the Red and Blue team dug in for their 4th hour on construction, to finish the job. It gave us so much satisfaction to look at the final slab when we had finished.

With the work completed we came back to the YMC to shower and some jump in the pool (from the 3rd storey) and enjoyed the new slide into the pool. It was lots of super duper fun. Dinner... Dinner was was like no other - hallelujah - it was amazingly good especially the much loved sweet bread. If you hadn't got it already, we are loving the food!!!

After dinner we managed to get through the crazy Filipino traffic with Smoke Dog (Miss Smoker) and Ryallsies (Mr Ryall) top notch driving. We went to TayTay, which is the local mall and each team was given 500 pesos (approx $12) to buy snacks for merienda (morning and afternoon tea) for the whole team for 3 days. The red group (who are writing this blog) got the best food which is a box full (approx 10 litres) of super awesome cookies and some MARTYs crackling, this stuff is the best.

After finishing off the night with some well deserved Starbucks, we piled back into the car only to realise that one of the cars would not start, Oh dear!! While Miss Smoker and Mr Ryall was trying to sort out how to get things going, Mini Staffy (Jesse Stafford) and Josh prayed over the cars engine. Jesse managed to touch the hot radiator hose and he was laying hands on the car, however quick reflexed ensure no damage. In short, after a lot of stress talking to the shopping centre security we eventually go home by piling 22 of the team into a 15 seater van. With some prayer and a bit of singing we managed to work hard, fight through the stress and be happy.

Today was awesome. So long farewell, we hate to say goodbye...
PS Sorry Mrs Erispe
PPS Cathy and Miss Smoker edited this
PPPS The weather was rainy and hot and muggy