A City Not Forgotten: Foundation and Walls

On Monday morning, we all got up and moving pretty quickly. Crossing the border was easy and we didn't have any accidents this year! They changed the merge where we got hit last year so that you can actually see what traffic is coming. We must not have been the only ones to have problems there.

We unloaded all of our stuff at the SHOC and then Michigan Tech made all of our lunches for us while Ferris and Friends loaded the tools and equipment into trailers. Then, we split into four teams and set off with our Casas leader for our work sites.

The major hiccup on Day 1 for almost all of the teams was a poor schedule for cement. The cement slab is one of the most important parts of the build and needs to be poured as early as possible on Day 1 to cure in time to stand the walls. Well, only Team Baleigh got their truck remotely on time - only an hour late. Everyone else's truck had been scheduled for Day 2 accidentally. Once we realized that and were able to get it fixed, the cement trucks were running about 4 hours late. Teams Robey, Tech and Hogoboom all managed to get their slabs poured and textured and their walls built, but had to leave the walls on the ground until Tuesday morning. Overachieving Team Baleigh however, got their walls and backboard up! The rest of the teams told Team Baleigh that on Tuesday, they all needed to slack so that we could get caught up!

Some of the highlights from Monday:
- Team Hogoboom was visited by Manwel, the pastor in their area, when he came to thank us all for coming. Part of his thanks included greeting each of us by name and giving us a holy kiss on the cheek. We didn't realize that until he started with Glenn and worked his way around the circle. Glenn was definitely caught off guard and the rest of us got a good laugh out of it. It was really cool for our whole team to see that we were being a blessing not only to Jesus, (our family), but also to the local church.

- Team Baleigh was building for Maria and her three children. Larissa, her oldest daughter, didn't know much English, but tried to help the team with whatever project she could find and introduced herself to everyone and tried to learn their names. Larissa's younger brother, Miguel, also tried to help but was told by his mom that he needed to "stop being annoying!" after he started doing rabbit ears on his sister's head.

- Michigan Tech students mentioned that a highlight was learning how to use the "pusher thing" on the cement slab to make the foundation. They were later informed that the pusher thing was also known as a tamp, but they liked "pusher thing" better.

- Emily, from Team Robey, mentioned that it was her first time learning how to trowel cement and that she enjoyed learning new skills.

- Nothing in a Mexico kitchen ever goes as planned. There were several times this week when Heather would make last minute adjustments to make our meals work in the sparse kitchen available to us at the SHOC. We're so thankful for her and her abilities! And thankful for her timing. Melissa and I were about to cook 10lbs of rice for dinner because we didn't see rice on the menu for any other day and didn't think Heather would have bought extra. Heather came in just in time to save the day (and dinner!).

- As Michigan Tech was making lunch, Mitch kept teasing them to hurry up and make it faster. He finally asked them if he gave them math problems if it would make them move any faster (it didn't). It would have gone faster if we'd gotten plastic knives to use to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but spoon handles work when you're desperate.

Here are some photos from Day 1: