sabato 2 novembre 2013

Change of career!

Hi everyone! 

Many days passed since the last time I could write a post. During these last two weeks I have been overwhelmed. I only had time for working and sleeping :)

Let's start with a bad news...my career as a tango dancer is over for the moment. Juan, the teacher, had an accident and he won't be able to walk for 4 weeks and then he will need physiotherapy for 3 months...it was very sad to see him like this, because I know that he lives teaching. I wonder how he will do...

Starting point.
The good news is that I now started a new career: I'm learning to work with mud for building huts :) So I started a course last Friday. Our goal: to build a place where poor people can be attended with natural treatments like medicinal herbs or receive psychological help if needed. The therapist will work in the clinic pro bono. 

Our dream!

 So we, 36 volunteer guided by an architect, started this adventure with a huge amount of positive energy end enthusiasm.
The first part was quite hard. We had to fill up bags with sands and use them as a stabilize the base of the future walls.
My first part of wall!


  So we filled 100 bags with an tremendous effort and then I was asked to calculate how many more we had to fill before starting the construction. After a quick calculation I gave the group the response: "More or less...100"
The group: "100!!! Ivan, are you crazy! What on earth are you talking about??? You must be joking!!!"
After a short explanation, I could convince them that Maths is not an opinion and that we really needed the 100 bags :) So back to work! Anyway, nobody never lost la buena onda!


When we started the construction of the walls in the afternoon, the group started working with a new energy! And After 3 hours, I could finish my first part of the wall!

The best part was jumping into the swimming pool to prepare the mud :) Unfortunately, I don't have picture of that part, because as you can imagine we were all full of mud everywhere...
Internal walls
 ...and my camera is not mud proof :) Afterwords we split in several small groups and each group was responsible for a part: external walls, internal walls, doors, windows...work...workand work...and then another great moment! It was time time to cover


External walls
the walls with mud. This process is quite easy: you prepare the mud, you took in your hand and you splash it against the wall. The mud sticks on the structure. Now, during this part of the construction passed some small "accident" like a handful of mud flying "accidentally" towards another component of the group :) 

Creative wall

Understandably, the person who was hit always thought that the mud had been tossed to him/her on purpose and reacted fighting back :)

Now I don't want to bore you with to many details. All in all was a great experience and I learned how to build walls using only sand, soil, water and some wood! We couldn't finish the clinic but we had a wonderful time together. Moreover, I will continue working on the clinic to help the therapists to finish it!






The merendero
  All this experience helped me a lot in this week. After closing the course I was called to a new challenge! Tomorrow we will build a mud wall around the "merendero" which is the  place where we give to eat to the poor kids(like Franco, whom you see in the picture). On top of that we entertain them with different projects like theatre and lots of games :)
The goal is to protect a little more the merendedero which has been vandalised a couple of time and to show the poor families how they can improve their barracks only using the things they can find around them! So far, all the kids and some women are working hard with us. We are missing the men power...we hope that our 40 volunteer who will come tomorrow will transfer some of their enthusiasm to the men of the Barrio! Anyway, during this week I was asked to help to coordinate all needs for tomorrow. I will only discover on Sunday if I did a good job ;)

So if you want to know what will happen, keep following me!

Bye! 

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