Posts Tagged: manual labor

What can top concrete? Machetes.

October 19, 2012

Jennifer and me holding the machetes after a day’s work! Thursday (for those of you keeping track) we worked with children in the morning and machetes in the afternoon.  First, let me tell you a bit about machetes. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C: one would think that machetes would be few and far between, and yet, we were familiar with them. Ask any of my family members.  There was a day …

Concrete, part dos.

August 16, 2012

Some pictures to whet your appetite: The ladder being “fixed” The whole process, from start to finish. The process of moving the cement merits detailed exposition.  The workers (and John) shoveled the cement into buckets that we had lined up (about 8 of them); these were the same buckets Ana and I had used to hurl water.  I picked up a bucket, turned, handed it to Jen, who passed along to Ana, to the next and then the next, then, …

Concrete(ly) in my body

August 15, 2012

*Disclaimer: This is MUCH longer than most of my other posts.  It will take a while to read through.  If you were to print it out, it would be about 2 pages double-spaced. I’m going to post part two separately.  Almost three weeks after the fact, about to reconstruct the day of concrete and cement, I looked in my journal today to see what I’d noted, in the hopes that it might jog my memory of the day.  What I …

We’ve only just begun

August 14, 2012

6 a.m. was our departure from the Casa Retiros.  To work backwards, that meant that breakfast began at 5:30, and wake up, 4:30. My earliest meetings, at home in the States, start at 10 am—that’s a stretch for me.  My favorite time of day is morning, where I ease in—often with the same routine: skinny coffee and a book in my pajamas; an hour later, breakfast; then gather and prep for the day.  I had no coffee with me, and …