October 2019, Lark on the Move

I know what you’re thinking. “Lara, it’s only been a week and you’re writing again? What, is the world ending?” I know, I haven’t been very consistent with this, but my original intention was to actually write weekly, so don’t be too surprised! And part of the reason I’m making such an effort is that I know there’s no chance I’ll be writing at the end of this week. We have two teams coming in back-to-back… aka as one team leaves Saturday night, the next team will be arriving which means we get no break at all for the next two weeks. Don’t get me wrong – it will be great. It’s always great to have teams here. But it also means that personal time is essentially nonexistent, and every workday is totally draining because I’m interacting with people all day and running around trying to make sure things run smoothly. So here I am, catching you up again before you can expect two weeks without a peep from me.

First, here are some pictures of the construction. I don’t have much to say because it’s all mostly superficial work now… so enjoy these pictures of things starting to look pretty!

Second floor with some of the posts removed. I like how you can see the bricks and the formwork from below even though they’re all hidden from above now.

Second floor from inside. Looking good! The right side of the picture will be two classrooms, and the corridor is to the left.

Third floor with the half-wall completed. Now all that’s missing here is the bamboo roof! But this is going to remain a huge open space which will be awesome!

I like this contrast… un-stuccoed wall to the left, pretty finished wall to the right.

The side of the building before stuccoing…

… and after! It was funny to watch like 8 guys working on one wall at the same time. They did that so they could get the stuccoing finished in one go, rather than having to do it in stages. It turns out better that way!

It’s so satisfying to look at the finished walls! And that crisp line above the windows is beautiful. When it’s painted, the first level will be orange (ick, but that’s the EA color scheme) and the upper floors will be off-white.

Electrical tubing going in! These will be hidden behind a layer of drywall.

The building in context. Our existing classroom building is the one running along the right side of the picture, and the new building is in the back.

We had a funky schedule last week. Most of the kids were off of school on Monday. Brace yourself as I attempt to explain why (parents would lose their minds if this happened in the States). The school decided to have a mandatory event on Sunday, and then they cancelled school on Monday to make up for it. We found out about this about 2 weeks ago which, given how far in advance we usually know about these things, is pretty darn good. This is something I’ll never understand, though. How can you just change the schedule on a whim like that? And expect everyone to come on a Sunday instead?? This kind of thing is nothing new, though. There are approximately a thousand holidays and festivals in Peru, and every time one comes along, it seems like there’s literally no one who knows whether the kids will have school. And then we find out the day before. To me, it seems like SOMEONE had to know if there was going to be school, right? (If not, we have bigger problems than I thought.) So why is that person keeping secrets? Just tell everyone so we can all share in the joy of knowledge!

I may not understand how they can operate like that, but I have gotten to the point where I expect it and am not fazed by it. I mean, lucky for me, the kids’ schedules don’t affect mine very much. School or not, it’s all kind of the same to me. But if I was a teacher, I don’t know if I could handle it.

This boat appeared in the middle of our street a couple of weeks ago. They were out painting it last weekend when we went to get cheesy bread, and in the time that it took us to walk there, eat our cheesy bread, and walk back, they had painted the entire boat. Ha! Today, it was gone again, I suppose back to the ocean.

Anyway, Monday was a “holiday” for the kids, but we all worked anyway. Then, Tuesday was an actual national holiday. All of the schools were closed, and none of our programs were operating. We still “worked”, but it was a Staff Day which is usually a training and team building day for the national and missionary staff. This time, they did something a little different and it was more of a rest and reflection day. Jim broke down the Lord’s Prayer, and we had time to ourselves to sit and pray over/reflect on each part. It was really nice. I felt like God used that time to help me work through some things I’ve been sitting on for a while. It was hard, but I felt so much better afterward and like I regained a sense of direction that I had lost a while ago without even realizing it.

On top of that, it was just nice to have time to spend with the rest of the staff without having to worry about the kids! We played an elimination-type game together before lunch, and it was hilarious watching how competitive everyone got. It was one of those games where someone calls out commands (a little like Simon Says), and some of the commands require you to get into groups of various numbers. When a command was called, everyone was grabbing people left and right to drag them into their group to get the right number. I was practically in tears from laughing so hard.

I had already been eliminated at this point…

The rest of the week was basically just spent getting ready for the team. I went over my notes and plans, made a shopping list, went over my notes and plans again, checked to see what materials we have in stock, went over my notes and plans again, spent time worrying that I was forgetting something… you know, a very efficient use of my time. I think I have it all under control, I really do. But I won’t lose that feeling until the teams are gone and I know for a fact that I had everything planned to a T.

Friday had a “fun” surprise… Remember how Milton and I supervised the digging of a pool to chemically treat the bamboo for the new building’s roof? Well, they put some pieces in to soak on Monday, and Debbie asked me to give Milton a hand taking them out. “Okay,” I thought. “No problem. That’ll be easy.” HA! Joke’s on me. First of all, these bamboo pieces are 10-15cm in diameter and 6 or 7 meters long (sorry for the metric but that’s now the world in which I operate). Second of all, you know those lines you see on bamboo stalks? Those are the knots, and there’s basically a disk of bamboo there (so you couldn’t see straight through a stalk, for example). One of the dads worked to hammer a piece of rebar through all of the knots so that the chemicals could run all the way through the inside of the stalks… which meant that they were all filled with water. Which meant they were even heavier than before. And third of all, because there’s just a hole in the middle of each knot, the only way to get all of the water out is to stand them up nearly vertically.

Milton and I eventually got somewhat of a system down, but it was dependent on one person holding one end of the bamboo down against the ground (when all it wanted to do was seesaw up) while the other person walked their end up until it was completely vertical. The harder part was lowering it. There was one time with a particularly heavy piece of bamboo where I couldn’t keep the ground end down, and I basically nearly crushed Milton because as my end went up, the other one went down, and he was caught in the middle. At one point, we were holding a piece upright, waiting for it to drain, and he says totally seriously, “We’re going to die.” I burst out laughing but then also agreed with him… It did feel a bit terrifying every time. Thankfully, Debbie came to help with the last half, and with three people, the whole thing was significantly less precarious.

Milton and Eddy, two of the national staff, working in the bamboo treatment pool. Looks fun, right?

Milton and me holding up a bamboo flagpole. I feel like Milton looks a little tense in this picture, and I promise my smile is fake.

We now have 19 treated pieces of bamboo… out of 180. So, what I’m saying is, we’re nearly there! Ha. Haha. But, I do think there are plans in the works to build a structure to prop up the bamboo so that every bamboo-draining day isn’t the most terrifying day of everyone’s lives.

In conclusion, never bank on the accuracy of a Peruvian school calendar, chemically treating your own bamboo is neither as easy nor as fun as it sounds, and wish me luck for the next two weeks. See you on the other side!

Can you believe September is over??!! I can’t, and I also can’t say that I’m very happy about it. It was a great month! Everything was normal – no crazy modifications to the schedule or extra things to worry about. The rest of the year isn’t going to be quite as calm. I know that the next few months will fly by even more quickly than September, and I’m trying to keep myself from stressing out about it! We have two team weeks in October, scheduled for consecutive weeks. November will be filled with the chaos of trying to pull together the finishing touches on the building and freaking out that I’m going to run out of time to do everything on my list. And I’m only going to be here for about a week and a half of December, so it barely counts at all. Ahh!

I could drag you with me down the black hole of swirling thoughts that keep my stress level at a steady higher-than-it-needs-to-be, but instead, I’ll spare you and talk about the last few weeks since I haven’t been doing very well with my “weekly” posts (a consistent theme, it seems).

The building. My gosh, the building. We have all three floors in place, and they’re starting to work on the finishes! EEK! There’s still definitely a lot to do, but the general shape of the building is there, and it’s huge. This is the only building on the property that has a 3^rd story, and it’s so cool how much more of the neighborhood we can see from up there! It’s probably not cool for our neighbors because now we can see over their walls, but oh, well. Our one neighbor has a 2^nd-floor balcony facing our property, so it’s not like privacy was ever much of a thing around here.

This is about where we left off last time… plus a little formwork on the second floor.

Over the next few weeks, it’s going to start looking like a whole new building. Only the brick walls are up now, and they’ll begin working on the drywall soon which means that we’ll really be able to see what the spaces are going to look like. Currently, they look super nice and well-lit by daylight, but that’s because most of them only have two walls! On top of that, Debbie is working on finding people to build the doors and the windows, and the electrician is going to start coming more regularly to start the wiring. Oh!! And the roof! The roof is going to be supported by a bamboo structure, and we started the whole bamboo preparation process this week.

On Tuesday, I got to work early and helped Milton, the maintenance guy, get everything ready for the bamboo delivery. Debbie was at the bamboo store picking out the individual pieces of bamboo… 180 pieces of 6ish-inch diameter, 6 and 7-meter-long bamboo. Yes. 180 pieces. Together, Milton and I supervised the removal of the rubble pile on the construction site, followed by the digging of a “pool” to be used to soak the bamboo in anti-bug chemicals. Yum. Then, he and I created an area for the bamboo to be stored while it dries. When I called Debbie to tell her we were ready, she said that the delivery truck was already en route! Geez! Then we had to unload it all which, thank goodness, the construction guys helped with. Even with the help, it felt endless! So now, we have a LOT of bamboo. And it all needs to make its way to the 3^rd floor eventually.

The front-end loader clearing away the rubble pile. This is the same guy who cut practically every single pipe on the property when he came to dig the foundation holes, so we were supervising him extra carefully this time. The only problem? No one remembered that there was a wastewater pipe running straight through the space where we wanted to put the pool. So yeah, that got cut (whoops!) and subsequently fixed the next day after we realized it was something important rather than just random, buried pipe scraps (because that actually is a possibility here. There’s so much junk buried on the property that you really never know what you’re going to dig up).

Ready for the bamboo! The area on the left is to store the pieces, and the “pool” on the right is to soak them in chemicals to protect against bugs.

On the topic of transporting things to the third floor… have I told you about how they move bricks there from the ground? I don’t think I have. They throw them. Yes, they THROW them. Watching them get the ceiling bricks to the 3^rd floor was my favorite thing. One guy stood on the 10ish-foot-high pile of bricks… and I’m still not sure how it seemed like it never got any shorter because he was taking bricks from the pile he was standing on, but anyway… He threw them one by one to a guy standing on “scaffolding” (aka one board on a shaky metal frame) about halfway up the second floor who threw them up to a guy at the edge of the third floor who threw them to a guy in the middle of the third floor who put them in a stack. Three throws per brick. No pressure. I have a video, but Debbie told me not to post it because “it’s not really how they’re supposed to do things”. Maybe it’s not the safest in theory, but while watching them, I never felt like there was anything to worry about. I can show you the video another time.

THIS is the pile of ceiling bricks they had to throw up to the third floor. What. The. Heck.

Here are some pictures to catch you up on the progress!

Starting to build the formwork for the second-floor ceiling/third floor!!

The brick structural walls are going in as well, as you can see in the back. I’ll never get tired of seeing the building change so quickly!

Front view… they had to put up some protective netting to make sure nothing fell on any kids going to use the bathroom (which is below the netted area)

The formwork for half of the floor. They still need the second half (up to the brick wall in the back) and the area to the bottom left above the corridor.

They put in the half-wall railing along the 2nd-floor corridor! And that guy standing at the top is there to pour concrete into the column below him. It looks like he’s standing on basically nothing… and that’s fairly accurate. This is their version of scaffolding.

One of the walls on the first floor with pipes for a bathroom on the left and tubes for the internet on the right.

Same wall after the stucco job… it’s like there are a bunch of secrets hidden within this wall!

Putting the finishing touches on the third floor before the pour. The electrical guys are working on getting the million electrical tubes into place.

The finished slab! The two bricks sticking out of the middle are for drains. We actually weren’t there during the pour (stressful) because we were at our church’s women’s conference, but we were happy to see the finished product when we got home the next day!

Exposed brick walls outside of the second-floor classrooms.

This is how they get the concrete up to the third floor for the columns. Since the concrete mixer is on the ground, they mix it down there and then send it up to the top in 5-gallon buckets on a pulley system.

Three men working on three parapet walls.

Outside of work, the last few weekends have been super fun! Since “birthday weekend”, we’ve been doing our best to put things on the schedule for the weekends, no matter how simple. The first weekend after “birthday weekend”, we didn’t go anywhere crazy or do anything elaborate, but we did take some time on Saturday to play outside. Jocelyn and I started off playing 2-square (not the most exciting game… it ends up being a social time while simultaneously bouncing a ball between us), and eventually, Julie and Debbie joined and made it a full-on game of 4-square! Everyone gets a little competitive (though probably mostly me), so it was a lot of fun. It’s kind of ideal that there are 4 of us; it’s the perfect number for nearly every game. We should take advantage of that more often!

The following weekend was the women’s conference at our church. I didn’t know what to expect, and even if I did, I think my mind would have been blown. It’s quite the production. There were over 800 people there, and not just from Peru. There were big groups from Mexico and Argentina, plus people from Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile… craziness! The weekend was full of performances and different speakers and really amazing worship. It was fun to be a part of it. And the speakers were in English with translators, so I didn’t even have to focus super hard to understand what was going on. Julie, Debbie, Jocelyn, and I stayed overnight in Lima on Friday and Saturday, and besides having a great time at the conference, it was so nice to be outside of our property walls for a change!

I don’t know how to even begin describing this. We were driving through Chilca on a Tuesday night when we ran into this marching band blocking the street. They were getting ready for a “toro loco” (crazy bull)… aka this dude wearing a bull mounted on a metal frame and covered in FIREWORKS. They played a song while he danced around and fireworks went off. It was ridiculous. And also kind of terrifying. You couldn’t pay me enough to wear that thing! And when it was over, the band dispersed, like that was the only reason they all gathered together. It took maybe 3 minutes total, and it was three of the strangest minutes of my life.

The staff before heading off to the women’s conference!

A picture from one of the worship sessions during the women’s conference. So many people!!!

Last weekend was actually Jocelyn’s birthday weekend (unlike the fabricated Julie-and-Lara birthday weekend), and we went to the zoo to celebrate! It’s interesting to visit zoos in different parts of the world because while the major animals are the same, there’s a ton of diversity in the other animals depending on where you are. This zoo had so many varieties of birds and monkeys because they’re all native to South America, and some of them were things I’d never seen before. The highlight of the day, though, was in the “international” section of the zoo… they had three 1-month-old baby tigers!!! EEE!! They. Were. So. Cute. I could have watched them all day. There was a huge crowd around because the obsession with baby animals is universal. I mean, how could you not love them?

BABY TIGERS!!!! Definitely the highlight.

The zoo crew! Me, Jocelyn, Vanessa, and Julie

I kept staring at these zebras, confused because I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything like them before but almost certain that it wasn’t my first time seeing a zebra. Turns out, there are three varieties of zebras. These are Grevy’s zebras which are less common than the other varieties. They also have much tighter stripes…

…as you can see. These are the more common Plains zebras which are probably the ones I’m used to seeing. What strange animals.

In case you’re curious about what you’ll get if you order a hot dog at a Peruvian zoo… They put those crunchy fries on top, and the “ketchup” is NOT normal ketchup. It’s weirdly pink and doesn’t taste especially good.

Anyway, as you can see, we’ve been busy, if only because we’re making up ways to keep things interesting. But the building project is definitely heating up, I’m starting to accept the reality that we have two team weeks coming up, and we’re all bracing for a truly busy October. Let’s see how long it takes for me to write again! (Ha!)

Stucco, Staff Day, and Bamboo Fun

Zoo-ming Through September