Belated update...Techo building

Hey all. I know this is way overdue but I wanted to share a brief bit about my service project . So I last told you that I signed up to do a service project whose mission was to build 270 houses in Lima and Pisco. There were 12 teams of about 30-50 people and my team (Escuela Morada--purple school) was sent to Villa Maria de Triunfo, a barrio on the southern border of Lima. Took us over an hour to get there from my neighborhood. That just gives you an idea of how big Lima actually is. We arrived quite early in the morning, around 1:30am (to an actual school near our work site), to our group leaders banging pots and pans to welcome us. Not my idea of fun, but I got used to it. We stayed at the school for a week,a all 33 of us, sleeping on one large cement classroom floor.

We had 6 long days of work ahead. Most of the days we spent lugging boards, wall panels, and beams up the side of a muddy rocky mountain, most times in the misty Lima rain. I have never been so physically tested in my life. And even though it was super painful most of the time, like grunting and biting your lip painful, it felt so great the at the end of the day to be really physically exhausted. I really felt like I was working and helping. Each team (2-3 people) had two houses to build in very little time. Luckily some of the house components were pre-made, like the walls. What we did was level the land (which was really bad terrain for building), put down the support beams and floor boards. then we put up the walls, secured them with primary and secondary beams, and finally attached the tin rooves. It sounds easy in theory, except for the fact that we had to lug all of the materials way up hill. I am seriously surprised that I didn't have a slip and fall accident. The worst that happened was that a heavy rock fell on my shin. Got a proud black and blue that I showed off for a few weeks after. It's just now beginning to vanish.

My team or cuadrilla finished house number one by day 5, which left one day for house number two. Of course our last day was the coldest day and after a week of mist the land was getting really muddy and more and more slippery. As night began to fall the last night, we were working diligently to finish. It was very hard since the light had gone and we were using my travel booklight to illuminate things. All of the sudden we heard a loud noise, felt the ground shake, and heard someone scream. The ground right below the house we were constructing partly fell through due to the rain and just plain un-durability(?) of the land. The land that fell crushed the wall of a shack below us, including an older woman inside. She ended up with a cut in her head, but was actually ok in the end. All in all, the civil defense and fire department ended up coming to the mountainside and all teams had to stop work. It will luckily be continued this month thanks to a new set of volunteers.

This incident, albeit very scary to me, is a regular occurrence in this area. The land is horrible and the only people living on it are doing so because they have no other choice. A new house is only a band-aid to the very complex problem of urban poverty. I wish I could have done more, but at least we assisted in the betterment of these people's daily lives. Having a roof and floor and wooden home is a nice upgrade to a cardboard cube. I am really grateful for the experience I had, especially all the people I was able to meet. My group consisted of mostly Peruvian college students who thankfully taught me some awesome Spanish slang words and loved my somewhat lousy attempts at cursing.

In summation, the trip was incredible and super rough at the same time. Ia happened to meet two wonderful dutch girls there (thanks to AIESEC, smaaaaaall world). It was great to have an optional break from Spanish. But the majority of the time it was Spanish so that was helpful for my language skills. I mean who knows when I will need all the vocabulary I know have relating to construction. You just never know. Thanks for reading.

p.s. Stay tuned next time for my trip to the states :) Back to Lima in one week, currently in Maine.