LA PAZ, CARAZO

Beginning in October, Nindirí has been invited to participate in a KH build in La Paz, Carazo.  Here, even when RBC existed, it never did in Nicaragua.  What we have are construction groups who settle in an area 2-3 months and work with the local congregation and surrounding congregations to complete the KH.  Each day, two different congregations are invited to support the work.  So far, we have gone three times.  I have attached some photos showing progress.

Taken Sept 11, 2015.  Only dirt.  The men spent all day digging a 6 ft. deep trench in a square around that high pile of dirt you see. 

Taken Oct 23, 2015.  That dirt trench is now the retaining wall that you see surrounding the KH.  Lots of progress, right?!

Because of budget concerns, just about everything is done by hand on the site.  And if you're looking for an RBC safety video, better you just turn your head and forget about it.  Shoes are whatever fits and hard hats are optional.  For instance, that trench I mentioned above could've been done easily with a backhoe, but we don't have one...we used manual labor.  On my first build here, men were manually mixing concrete all day...truly back breaking labor, but thankfully, I see that on this build, the one machine we DO have is a small mixer.  

Another big difference is comfort.  If you come to work, you arrange your own transportation and bring your own everything.  There's no snack girl walking around every hour giving you Gatorade and cookies.  And even though it's over 90 degrees, everyone is completely covered because 20 minutes in this sun EVEN with sunscreen, and you're toast.

There's also a slight difference in the spiritual ambiance.  The day does NOT start with a prayer or text consideration nor does lunch.  It often seems kind of thrown together, but then again this  IS Latin America.

To give you another example of things done by hand, we even made our own concrete...well, to be more specific, we make our own sand to mix with concrete bags.  On Friday, my job was separating gravel from concrete.  These sisters in the pictures show you how. 

Gravel was poured into screen netting first.

Then the gravel was immersed in a barrel of water.  By agitating the gravel, we separated the large bits from the sand.  The sand fell to the bottom of the barrel and as the water level rose, we scooped the sand out for later use. *My thanks to my Vanna White-ish model, Cathy Solowiejko from Pan Casán, Granada, for helping me demonstrate this.  She was a super fun partner to have on Friday!*

In the wheelbarrow is what we started with.  The other pile is the gravel and a pile behind me (which you can't see) is the sand.

 The really exciting news though is that when they're done with La Paz in about three more weeks.............THEY'RE COMING TO NINDIRÍ!!!!!!!  Yeah, we're up!  The congregation is in a buzz about how we're going to provide housing and food to the team coming, but I know that if we have a good attitude, Jehovah will bless our prayers for help.  So my hope is that a VERY SOON future post will have these kind of pictures from my local congregation.

Just as a reminder, this is the land we've purchased as the site for the future KH in Nindirí