Bain is looking pretty good...

The trip is going well. I really like the group - a great group of individuals with mix of laid back-ness and interesting-ness. We are making decent progress on the house too. The daily rhythm is something like this: leave the hotel at 8am, drive 45 minutes to the village, working by 9am. Break at 10:30 for 10-15 minutes, work until 12:30. Break for 30-60-minute lunch, work until 3ish, maybe another quick break, then finish at 4:30.

After a day or so of framing and dirt shoveling, we were ready to pour concrete. The first day of that was all manual mixing, which is very, very hard! On the way to the internet cafe tonight I passed a pile of sand beside a pile of gravel and it gave me the shivers. My back was nearly broken for the first day or so despite decent efforts to use my legs, but it seems to be recovering. We also found a great massage place nearby that's $15US per hour! Very therapeutic.

Today, thanks to a wonderful new invention (the cement mixer), our work didn't involve manual mixing - such a treat! We carted wheelbarrow-fulls of this to the site this morning and finished pouring the floor of the house. Then we formed human chains to move many bricks and started on the walls.

Aaron, one of the Irish lads and I also played soccer against the local kids at lunch today - that was a ton of fun, though in 90+ degree heat, it wiped me out for the afternoon. Hopefully we will repeat that, without the dehydration factor. Eddie, the husband in the couple we're building the house for, played on our team as did one of the young girls; the other 12 were against us, and when they come up to your hip height, it's quite a challenge not to send bodies flying!

Every night we congregate around 7 for a group dinner, then have free time (though by then most of us are eager to crawl into bed - long days!). It's a good rhythm - lots of fun! And now, off to dinner...

written by  GoBlue on July 13, 2007 from Kuching, Malaysia
from the travel blog: Joc's Journeys
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