October 16: Day 3 - Mission Possible

Walking to the jobsite this morning we were all feeling great. A good night’s sleep, no hangovers and a couple of more climate adjusting days. We knew we had a tough day ahead with all of the concrete mixing and carrying work. Our day turned our great! It was our toughest day yet, most productive and the funniest day! Boy the day goes by fast when you’re laughing and having lots of fun in the sun! We are 17 people from all across Canada and one lonely American who have come together on this mission and we are a cohesive awesome team!!

Our local trades standing on the start of our concrete floor at the start of the day!

Today we struggled slightly with supplies at the beginning. Running out of our key ingredient cement mix. We bought all we could from the Gashora village and then our local lead hand had to travel 35mins to the next village to be able to buy 8 bags there. How did the bags get from the other village to Gashora…well on bicycle taxi’s. You will see pictures below of the bicycles that carried our order for a couple of dollars for delivery. It would be an hour plus round trip for the bicycle taxis. Wow!

Dona and Hulio sitting on the job!

Water was the other key ingredient we ran out off. Not a lot of rain fall in Africa and we drained the tank. We quickly had a local hired to bring water out of the local river take and forth to us for the rest of the day. See how he carried the containers in the below pictures. Wow! Imagine his calf muscles!

Our conga lines worked great today getting the concrete from the mixing location into the building as well we had the local helpers on the mixing. We saved a lot of sore backs today! In the pictures below you will see our progress on completely the kitchen area floor. What we thought would be a two week task at the get go, we know believe it is possible to be able to complete it tomorrow. We will them move onto the two small rooms off the kitchen as well as starting to parge (Thin concrete mix that is flicked onto the wall with a trowel and smoothed over) the interior walls of the kitchen.

Mark and Shawn loading up the dirt

After we completed today, we went to the local pub for a “pop” and we were accompanied by one of our local lead hands who is a closet rapper. We convinced him to rap a couple of songs for us! He did a great job! Concrete mixer by day and rapper by night! LOL And to top it off, the beer was less expensive than our “resort”. 850 franc’s for a large pint. (672 franc = 1 USD) Yep beer is pretty cheap here!

Walking back to our home away from home, we felt good after our day! Knowing this mission is possible! We are already excited to see the end result…

Wow! The progress we made today!

Marianne Thompson

DWC Volunteer Participant
Rwanda, October 2013