Yesterday and today

09 July

Today I laid bricks at the toilet we are building. The day was fairly similar to yesterday during work.

This is a great movie.

After I finished work, I went to The Gables for the first time. That is the name of the local shopping centre near Lidwala. I bought some needed water, toothpaste, and shampoo.

It was my turn to cook dinner for everyone tonight. My Welsh roommate Catlin and I made Spaghetti Bolognaise with garlic bread.

At night I showed a few of the other volunteers The Gods Must be Crazy; one of my favourite South African movies. Thanks to Mom and Dad for showing it to me. The other volunteers seemed to enjoy it.

10 July

Today had a very interesting distribution of labour over time. For parts of the day I was working very hard, as I was using a pickaxe to clear out land for a water tank. We were working with more people from World Challenge, and around 11:30 they decided to take a lunch break. Michael said we should wait for them to begin working again because the land was already cleared and he didn’t want to give the same directions for the next thing twice. So we waited.

I had nothing to do, so I looked around. Charlotte and Eleanor were laying down and using their backpacks as pillows. After intense pickaxing, that looked incredibly comfortable. I decided to join them. I closed my eyes for a bit, and when I opened them it was 1:30. Michael said we should just start without the World Challenge group, because he wanted to leave the building site by 2:00. We began to gather rocks to build a foundation. Some of the World Challenge people came back about 20 minutes later.

As we collected the rocks, one of the local builders was using a pickaxe to neaten up the corner of the foundation. He came across an enormous bolder, which was inconveniently sitting in the exact area that needed to be cleared. The builder dug out the boulder from the back. It was not round like a boulder should be, but rather lopsided. It was too massive and hard to break with a pickaxe, so all we could do was push it. It took about seven people to move the boulder. One well-timed push by everyone at once could get the boulder to move onto its side, thus pushing it forward a few centimeters. It was incredibly difficult. It took about ten pushes before we finally got to the ledge, and one last push sent it on its way and out of ours. It was very satisfying to see it go. Michael and another local builder both said I was very strong, but they seemed to have done more than me.

I will probably work at the same site tomorrow. Hopefully no more boulders will show up.

This boulder is about half my height and 100 times my weight.