3 March: Dancing and Digging, the Bond Grows Stronger

This Thursday of work was a mixed bag for the team. The big, tough men helped a group of phenomenal Haitian men set up a work site perimeter "fence", and begin digging the trenches for the foundation of the new church. The lovely ladies went to the school and visited each classroom, where they learned a lot and their hearts were touched by a new Haitian "fist bump of love". (I'll try to explain that later)  It's difficult to say who had more fun or who learned more.
For us men (big, tough, or otherwise) it was great to see that the truck delivering supplies was already at the site when we got there. Somebody decided that filling the ditch with rubble so the truck could drive across it was not necessary, so we didn't do that. Instead, the items were carried or dragged across the road to the work site.  Although it's only a two-lane road (one in each direction) in rather poor condition, it is still a main highway and carries a huge amount of traffic.  All of this traffic, including the zillions of huge transport trucks, motorcycles, and everything in between flies down the highway at breakneck speed.  If you or anything else are in the way, a loud horn is blown, there's no thought of slowing down unless perhaps a collision is imminent.  This makes crossing that road a perilous process indeed.  Fortunately, there were only a few trips needed before it was all safely at the work site.
The materials consisted of a dozen long boards (rough cut 1x5's) and about 2 dozen poles made of more-or-less straight branches.  The poles were cut in half and pointed on one end - all done with a machete.  They were used as stakes to hold the boards to make a perimeter fence around everything, with just one board making up the fence.  Once this fence was put up, and I must say that we had no idea why they did this, the architect spent an hour marking the perimeter fence with spray paint and laying out a cross-work of strings like a web.  Those strings made it difficult to walk anywhere, but they showed where we needed to dig trenches, three feet deep.
Some of those trenches (? all of them?) went straight through the existing concrete floor and foundation.  It was darn difficult to bust through the cement or tile to get down to the dirt below.  We saved a bunch of the shattered, pretty green tile from the floor, with plans to make it into a mosaic cross to give to the new church as a memorial from their original church. Kathy plans to make a picture frame for each of us, too, with a piece of green tile incorporated into the frame.