The Breakthrough Continues

Our momentum has not slowed and we have continued to work harder and happier than the heights we already were achieving.  Wednesday brought another burst of productivity in the garden and chicken coop. Some of our crew finished the standing beds alongside new members of the community who came out to join us today. That group decided to capitalize on its time standing next to each other around a four-foot box to teach English and learn Portuguese with our new friend.  They were surprised to learn that all of the people on their part of the job could sing Baby Shark with perfect U.S. accents.

Another group turned into the express delivery crew for all of the materials involved in putting a cement floor in the chicken coop.  In this case, that meant that they had to deliver 10 110-pound bags of cement from the riverfront to the coop, along with innumerable wheelbarrows full of sand. They also had to carry buckets and buckets of water, though the water source was right in the garden, making their lives easier than if they had had to bring the water from the river.

Before they could prep the cement mix, they had to do their best to level the ground inside the coop, so they went out to a shady spot in the forest with Zé and dug up some soil to add to the floor that was already there. From there, they made a strangely coarse cement mix that could not possibly be "poured," treating it more like stucco to be spread and smoothed over the whole surface of the space. They hand mixed everything using hoes and shovels, which made for some serious manual labor all afternoon. They finished about half the job by the time we broke for a dip in the river.

Still others worked to salvage all of the wood that had come out of the old roof for the shade area of the garden.  Removing nails is tedious but satisfying work and we are aware that every usable piece of lumber that we can identify will definitely go into use somewhere.  The same goes for the nails and bolts that we removed from the existing garden structures.

Our master contractor Romario took on Mylan as an apprentice and completed the last details of the roof structure and then worked to reinforce the shade areas that currently hold all of the viable saplings that are slated for planting.

Once our workday came to an end, we either ran for the river or the laundry area, where a few of us tended to our long-neglected piles of (very!) dirty clothes.  Both of these destinations brought their own forms of relief to all of us.

We gathered in the evening and talked at length about why things have kicked into a new gear. We think part of it is our collective attitude and our commitment to maximize our contributions to this community.  We think another part is that the community has started to come out to work with us in bigger numbers and has found that we are pretty pleasant work partners.  Our third hypothesis is that adding music into our work environment has made everything much more fun. And finally, we are taking more risks at speaking Portuguese, even incorrectly, and the locals are truly happy to work with us to try to communicate. Whatever the explanation is, we are really ecstatic to feel the synergy that we have expected all along really come to life.  Happy, happy, happy!

We also awarded one more purple bike, this time to Gui (it's his second one!). Gui has been an awesome team member, especially because he is an excellent translator despite the fact that he is only 12-years old.  The burdens of complex translation have all fallen on Jesse up to now, but this year Gui has been a prime interpreter at the worksite, in camp, and even in our video interviews for our final projects.  He is also a great soccer player, and we consider him our captain.  All of us mentioned that we keep forgetting how old he is, because he seems to just be one of us, doing the jobs that we do and going wherever we go.  Gui was here on the 2017 trip, but as a 9-year-old, his experiences and his contributions were much different.  We are very honored and lucky that he joined us and we are already plotting his eventual attendance at SMC!

On a less lovely note, our lingering stomach issues have struck a couple of us harder than the rest, so we consulted with the nurse in the community who told us that we seem to have come in contact with a bacteriological infection that has pervaded the urban areas downstream in the last few weeks.   Probably some part of our boat trip led to our exposure.  We were happy to learn from the nurse that the exact medicine that Shawny got when she went to Santarém on Tuesday is the solution to this problem.  The person who started it first, Boo, has made a remarkable recovery from being largely spent for a day or two, and the others who started it later, including Scott and Katie, are starting to feel the effects.  We just added Jaron to the patient list as well, so it might be a day or two before he is back near 100%.  Everyone is taking things in pretty good spirits, though, of course, no one likes feeling poopy (in every sense of the word!).

Thursday is Jesse's birthday, so we will all rally to celebrate with him.  Please send your good wishes from wherever you are!

Today, the DIRTies took on the big task of paving the inside of the chicken coop. Here, Megan, Rylee, and Max are tirelessly mixing cement. 

Scott seemed to find this tree along the trail to the chicken coop quite beautiful (just kidding we had to dig a hole over there because we needed dirt). 

Maya and Lauren Soares showing off their cement-covered knees after helping lay the cement. 

Katie was very excited about laying down the cement (as you can see, Zé is laughing in the background). 

After work, both the DIRTies and the locals gathered to listen to music and share homemade bread and fruit juice. 

Max found the DONGLE so we got to listen to music on Junio’s speaker at the work site. 

A praying mantis decided to gift us with its appearance. 

Getting ready for a day of hard work. 

Everyone getting ready to view a ~WORLD PREMIERE~

 

Jaron wielding the iron hammer (after he broke the new hammer Shawny bought).