So much has happened since the last post, so I'll try to fill you in without getting boring!
The building work: There is now a visible room! We have cut away loads more of the mountain and filled in most of the gap behind the wall at the bottom of the mountain. There is still a decent sized hole though which we will fill in sometime this week. Logic does not seem to apply to the order of things here. The walls went up before the floor, and for one of the walls we had to build up a thin strip of rocks because we hadn't finished filling in the hole behind the lower wall, so there wasn't any land on which to build the fourth wall, but this didn't seem to matter until the other three walls were already up. The floor went down yesterday, and the level inside the building is now correct, but there is still a massive drop to fill in the other side of the wall. It seems a bit random, but the Colombians seem to know what's going on even if we don't! The lower wall has also now been plastered ready for us to paint a mural this week. We've been working alongside a pair of builders for the past 2 weeks, Jose and Jorge. We're not entirely sure who they are or where they've come from, but they now seem to turn up everywhere all the time, shouting 'Josh, Josh!!' (everyone in the neighbourhood seems to have learnt Josh's name and now loves shouting it whenever one of us walks past! We don't always know who they are either...). But this is fairly characteristic of our time here - great fun and lots of lovely people but we don't really know what's going on most of the time! Just go with the flow... Our working patterns have changed. We now work in shifts, working in pairs one day and then resting the next. We get up at 5.30am on a work day and work till about 6pm, with an hour or so off for lunch. Long days but it's helping to get the work done and having a day to rest after is helpful.
There will be a small terrace to the right of the building for the kids to play outside on, which needs to be done, the roof needs to go on, the windows and doors fitted, and the electric cabling done. Although this won't all be finished in the time we are here, they are so fired up about this project that we are confident it will be finished shortly after.
Here are some photos of the progression of the building work because my descriptions probably don't make any sense if you can't see it:
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| The mountain before we started work |
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| Having cut away a lot of earth and rock, we started building a retaining wall to enable us to build up to the top level. The full height of this wall is up to the top of the wood at the left side of the picture. |
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| The wall now at full height and the right side filled in (the hole on the left is still there!) |
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| The first wall going up,. You can see why we had problems building the wall perpendicular to this... |
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| The walls up to the height of the concrete lintel |
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| The retaining wall being plastered and the room taking shape up top. |
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| The finished walls ready for the roof |
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| The floor going down yesterday |
Kids Clubs: We have continued to help out with the kids clubs, normally leading an activity as part of a session led by Gina or Breidys (two amazing girls, 17 & 19, who run the kids ministry here). However, on the 19th June they left for a youth camp in Medellin. Unfortunately they're not back until we have left, which meant we had to say our goodbyes. This was so sad as it felt very much like the beginning of the end. We only have one week left here and we just love this community. Don't want to leave! We had a great final evening with them before they left though, sharing something called pizza vomito (vomit pizza... so named because it's so big you feel sick after eating it!). But because they're not here we've been left in charge of the Saturday kids clubs. Last week we covered Noah and the ark, up to the point where the rain starts. We will then finish looking at the story next week. It was great fun: we taught them some Colombian sign language for different animals - it was really cool to be able to link our two projects somehow- and played parachute games for the first time. The parachute had only previously been used to provide shade over the building site during the middle of the day! But the look on the kids' faces was so precious, they just lit up! Definitely worth the effort of finding one and bringing it out here with me. Next week we are going to attempt tie-dye with them. This will be spectacular - either spectacularly good or a spectacular disaster. We shall see!
Visas: Well, no visa in my passport is without a story! First of all we couldn't find the migration office. When we eventually got there, it turned out the passport Mary needed was in Bogotá. We had thought that our visas were 3 months, so we thought we were going to get them sorted a few days ahead of time, but actually it was only 90 days and we had had 2 months of 31 days, so we actually only had 1 day to spare. The rest of us managed to get our visas eventually, after having visited a shopping centre to get photos printed and photocopies of the passports. We phoned up the school in Bogotá where we've left some of our stuff and had a long wait overnight to see if the passport would arrive. The passport did arrive from Bogotá but the migration system was down all morning. Fortunately God knew what he was doing and the visa was issued that afternoon! Thanks for your prayers.
World Cup: In case you hadn't noticed the world cup is happening. We made the decision to support Colombia, because they had a much better chance of actually getting somewhere. And we would be ripped endlessly if we chose to support England. Looks like we picked the better option - my condolences to all of you who have no legitimate reason for supporting a team who are still in the world cup! (You can all support Colombia now!) But yeah, the atmosphere is crazy here. Colombia match days are just incredible, wherever you go is just a sea of yellow shirts and the noise levels are utterly bonkers. Whenever Colombia score the whole neighbourhood reverberates! Building work normally slows a little during the matches as everyone is gathered round the tv and only going to mix concrete now and then. The only thing is, we don't really want Colombia to get to the final because it's 2 days after we leave and it'd be gutting not to be in the country for such an amazing day...
Oh and just to explain the title, Caracol are the channel that show most of the matches, and this is their slogan which they shout at regular intervals during the match!
Oh and just to explain the title, Caracol are the channel that show most of the matches, and this is their slogan which they shout at regular intervals during the match!
Weekend mini-break: As the team were all absolutely exhausted, we had a weekend mini-break to a chalet village 10 minutes down the road about 2 weeks ago. The place we were staying was really peaceful, we had air con in the rooms (which actually meant I was too cold to sleep the first night!) and a swimming pool. We found the Santa Marta Crepes & Waffles in true step team fashion. The weekend was spoilt somewhat when Mary had her bag snatched by a passing motorbike, and we spent 4 hours that evening in a police station filing a crime report so she can claim for the money taken on the insurance. However it could have been a lot worse, she wasn't hurt and she wasn't threatened either. I know we will look back on that night and laugh as we had such a bizarre time in the police station (more detail on this on my Blipfoto if you want!), it just shook us all up a bit. Everyone is fine now though :)
Water: We've had a couple more days of rain, but we also had a scary moment, when half the mountain side just went up in flames because it's so dry. It's getting harder and harder to find water tanks to buy, so the price of these is going up as well. Please keep praying for this.
Ok I'll stop waffling now. I will try to update some of my blipfoto tonight so there'll be some more stuff on there for you if you want more!
Prayer requests:
- Water/rain
- Spiritual protection - we would really appreciate your prayers for spiritual protection over us for this final week
- Tiredness - that we wouldn't get so tired we cannot fully enjoy the end of our time here
- For good progress on the building work
- For strength when it comes to saying goodbyes - that the sentiment would be deep but not too upsetting
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