Jen's two part blog: About our day and Two Left Feet

About Our Day
What a day! we arrived at the worksite early to beat the heat and ended up doing a lot of sitting around until the concrete workers began mixing. A couple of us team memebers were feeling nauseous and it was touch and go at times. I learned that I had to work through it to distract myself from how sick I felt. The system of pouring concrete is like something out of the dark ages. We were laying concrete on the roof of the school. The team of mason workers set up a forty foot wooden ladder and each stood on a rung. Then a small motorized concrete mixer produced wet cement and sent the concrete up in small buckets up the ladder to us. We had two lines, one with the full buckets and one with the emptys. Then the empty buckets were sent down a rope and one of our team members caught the buckets on the ground and the process started all over again.

Two Left Feet
Robertson has been with us every day on the worksite. He is a skinny 7 or 8 year old boy with a huge snaggle-tooth. He has helped us all along the way with whatever task we have had. Yesterday we noticed that he had two left sandals on, one of them falling apart. On the way home we stopped and bought him a new pair of sandals and gave them to him today. After that he was teased by the school kids and they wanted him to leave. We kept him close to us and he heaved concrete with his bare hands next to us. At one point I was at the foot of the ladder catching the empty concrete buckets and got hit by two buckets as they came down. I got concrete all over me and was trying to get it off before it burned. All of a sudden Robertson comes running at me and starts pouring his bag of fresh water on my arms and legs. He took his shirt off and started wiping the concrete off my legs. This water was given to him by the forman for his hard work and was probably the only water he would get the whole day we worked. I started crying as he helped me. This little boy gave my the best gift that anyone has ever given me. I will never forget his sacrifice.