We began the day with breakfast at 7 a.m.: fruit juice, two pancakes, some scrambled eggs, and fresh mango, pineapple, and cantaloupe. It seems that everyone likes the food. More on food later.
They put the large figures in the hotel lobby for the night, and they go out front right after breakfast.
Just to remind you how we all looked when we got here, we appear below on Saturday at a restaurant in San Salvador, the capitol of the country. Included is Flor, another Habitat staffer. It seems that when the group exceeds 10 (we have 11), they add another person, so Francis is not on her own. We look pretty good for having awoken at 3:15 a.m. in Indianapolis to catch a hotel bus to the airport at 4 a.m. for a 6:44 a.m. departure from Miami. The flight from Miami to El Salvador was 2 hr 10 min. It is an hour earlier in El Salvador compared to Illinois.
Below, we arrive at our worksite after a 7:45 a.m. departure on Monday. The site is only about a 10-minute drive from the Mamapan hotel.
We meet our head mason, Julio, who greets us. He has two assistants, Alex and Oscar. Francisco, the homeowner, lives nearby and spent the morning working with us.
Most of the cinder block work was completed by earlier work crews. We spent the day prepping the walls for a primer coat of paint. We also prepared rebar for the top blocks which form an angle for the roof.
Alex demonstrates how a small piece of cinder block is used to smooth the walls.
Nicki demonstrates the tools of whitewashing the walls, that is, putting on the primer coat of paint on the walls, inside and out.
Bob makes his own progress on painting.
Oscar, one of our masons, puts mortar in the joints between the blocks.
Julio, the head mason, instructs Angela (Sam Fisher's aunt) on some construction details.
AJ shows how the masons made a hacksaw out of a length of rebar.
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