I have enclosed some more fotos of the recent work. It’s been a long week. As if the farm wasn’t enough, I have been working with two groups, one of which is building a clinic in a rural region near us. The second project is in helping launch a “church” camp for young people. The clinic will be expensive but a friend here, Allen Rice, decided to get it started by donating $5000. U.S. to start the wall around the site and deal with some of the issues of water inundating the area. So, I made the arrangements and we got two thousand block delivered to the site and for the last three weeks used a combination of local volunteers and some experienced masons. The project now is complete for the first stage, that is, two walls are up and a drainage system is in place so that the waters now go around the site- it’s drying out.. The volunteers will now level the space and we will build a central register to collect the sewer lines and pass them along to the city sewer system. When more money comes in we will build the actual register, finish the other two walls and add gates and pedestrian entrances. Meanwhile, at the same village, “Campo Santiago”, a Catholic Worker, Emily Sinnwell, has moved here and married a local journalist- she is an R.N. and now is working with the midwives and native Curers once a week. Additionally, we have a stove building workshop planned for this coming weekend. Three days to build three stoves of clay. The idea is that we will build three stoves with the instructor building one while everyone watches. The second day the students will join in the building and the final day the students will build one by themselves. Afterwards, the hope is that the stoves will spread and the young folks in the classes can make a little money building stoves for others in the village. Stoves are a little thing that is very important. Sixty five percent of the lung cancer in this region of the world is affecting women. All those cases are related to the carcinogens of wood smoke from open cooking fires. The stoves we are building use a stove pipe of metal to exhaust the smoke- also using only one third of the firewood of open fires. So, taking care of the above stuff has kept me busy trying to arrange for the work in Campo- which is actually near to us, as the crow flies, but takes about forty minutes of driving to get to. I have to use four wheel drive to get into the village- worse in the rains. This last week, however, I did manage to get some work done. Thanks to Santiago, our faithful employee, we got five loads of sand and gravel used for fill around the side of the workshop.
We also got “chapapote” or asphalt painted on most of the section to be interred. Santiago is so plodding, and effective. Always with a smile he fills up a wheelbarrow of fill and walks it around a hundred feet, dumps it and returns. For nine hours a day he keeps filling in the space. He also loves the animals so he feeds them every morning- talks to the rabbits and chides the hens and rooster. We bought another 10 chicks this week (sex unknown) and got them back to the hen house. Two of them were killed the following day by the older chickens who pecked them to death. We had to build a section within the chicken house, just for the new chicks to live apart until they get old enough to mix with the others. Oh- the things we discover each day.. We finally got the last of the drainage/sewage system finished early this week, as well. We had to build a register to join up the various old sewage lines with the new plastic. Now, I can pour a bucket of water in the toilet and hear it racing down hill and ending up in a “sumidero.” The sumidero is actually a kind of sink hole with probably a cavern beneath. Our region is filled with a series of caverns paralleling the main road.
The new site for the block machine is ready. We had waters invading the space where we had built a cabana to house the block machine and the generator. Over a meter of water entered last week so we had to move the machine to high ground- the best site is what used to be our kitchen at the old cabin. I removed the walls, we moved the machine, dried it out, oiled it and leveled out the space around for the sand, a space for the wooden trays and started to try and run the generator- it wouldn’t work. So, I had to take the generator to town where it is currently undergoing a cleaning and repair. The motor is back to running fine while the generator portion needs a replacement part which is on its way from Mexico City. In looking back at the process I wonder how I could have sited it better. It used to be the highest point but we started adding fill sand and gravel to have a level space for the drying of the block and brick. As we leveled out more space, we had to raise the fill up to a level of the road in order to be able to load the block. Finally, the fill got to be about five feet tall. Enough for now.
It’s late, saludos Richard
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