November 2019, Lark on the Move

Remember how excited I was months ago when they started installing electrical tubes? My designs were being put into action, and it was the coolest thing. WELL. That’s nothing compared to what’s happening now. They started installing the wiring this week, and the combination of stress and excitement that I’m feeling is slightly overwhelming.

The reason behind the stress is that I’m so much more responsible for the construction than I’ve ever been before. In my old job, we would make the drawings, hand them off to the construction company, and essentially just expect that things would be done as we designed them. There’s some back-and-forth with the electrical contractor if they have questions about the drawings, and we would visit the site a few times during construction to make sure that things were being installed as designed, but that’s it.

Here, Debbie and I are buying all of the materials ourselves. Her job has been much, much more difficult than mine because she’s truly been responsible for ALL of the materials while I’ve been focused on the electrical, but now I’m starting to get a sense of what she’s been dealing with since construction started. The electrician sends us lists of materials that he needs, but then I have to check them to make sure he’s read the drawings correctly and that his lists make sense. Managing materials and estimating wire lengths and such isn’t something I’ve ever had to do… and now I have to learn on the job while also acting completely confident so that the electrician respects my directions. AND I have to truly understand how everything works, down to the details, so that I can be sure he’s installing things correctly and explain how they should be installed if there’s something he’s not familiar with. AND I have to do that in Spanish which is a whole different adventure. I don’t know how my Spanish is in general, but let me tell ya, my electrical construction Spanish is rapidly improving. At this point, my Spanish in combination with my charades skills is enough to convey ideas so that the electrician and I can get on the same page. Basically, I half-explain things and make lots of hand-motions, he fills in the blanks, and I nod enthusiastically as he says the words I couldn’t.

Anyway, things seem to be going well so far. There’s still a long way to go with the cabling, plus they have to install a ton of lights and devices… but the first two light fixtures are in!!! And they look fabulous. Well, they look fabulous turned off. Nothing is connected to the panel yet, so who really knows? Eek now I’m thinking about the fact that they’re going to install all of this stuff and then connect it at the end and my gosh I hope it works correctly. That could turn out to be a very awesome day or a very terrible one.

Random funny picture of the week: This made me literally laugh out loud. This is butter… with security tags attached. Who knew butter was such a heavily shoplifted item? My guess was that they had an intern they needed to keep busy. “Hm… what can you do to help? AH! I know! Security tag the butter! Yes, yes, very important work. You have no idea how much money we’re losing every day on shoplifted butter.” “You’ll never guess what I made the intern do today. Hahahahaha go look at the butter!” The most expensive container is less than $3. Also, my personal favorite is the top shelf butter (by that I literally mean the butter that’s on the top shelf, not the fanciest butter) that is wrapped in foil and literally has the security tag TAPED to the foil packaging because there’s no tub to connect it to. This is an example of one of those times when I wonder what universe I’ve stepped into.

Welp, no need to worry myself about that yet! I’m already busy worrying about the fact that I only have about 3 weeks left here, and how on earth am I going to finish everything that I need to finish before my time is up?

Enjoy these construction/random pictures from this week…

This is a hole. It’s ridiculous. Milton and Eddy (two of the staff members) and one of the dads dug it, and I have never seen a more perfectly round hole. And it’s so deep!

To be honest, I really don’t know what they’re doing. It looks like they’re building a bunker, but it’s actually just for our laundry water. They’re going to put a big water tank in here with holes in it to let the laundry water seep out into the ground. That’s all I know.

Seems like a lot of work for a wastewater tank! But the water has to go somewhere, so here it is.

Starting the wiring on the third floor! Also, the finished floor is in, and the mountains look pretty.

Very exciting picture, I know… but in the middle of those white squares on the wall are white outlets! Progress!

The roof! The roof! Finally, we’re going to have a roof!

This bamboo roof is quite the undertaking.

I was wondering how they were going to get the bamboo up to the third floor, and I got my answer this week. I don’t have an action shot, but they literally are just standing the pieces up straight and passing them up to someone on the third floor. Ridiculous. You can see a piece of bamboo leaning against the scaffolding in this picture… there’s still quite the gap between the top of the bamboo and the third floor which means they need to hoist it up above their heads for the third-floor person to be able to reach.

Fun sights in Lima… we came across this scene as we were walking down the sidewalk. I have no idea what these guys are doing (questionable whether or not they know what they’re doing), but WHY is that ladder just resting on the wires above? Please tell me that no one is climbing up the ladder like that…

Current status of the bamboo shade structure! All of the pieces are in place, and now it just needs some varnishing and the actual shade that’s going on top.

This is where most of our wastewater is processed. The purple plants help with the process. The green plants are “weeds”… but they’re actually tomato plants that are growing because of tomato seeds that have gone down the sink drain!

Look! There are approximately a million tomatoes growing.

I think I’ve maybe had half a second to catch my breath since I last wrote. My gosh, the last four weeks have been insane. I don’t even know where to begin… The first two weeks were busy, but that was expected. We had two church groups come back-to-back, and team weeks are always crazy and exhausting. Then, instead of having a chance to recover, Debbie and I had to scramble to put together up-to-date drawings of the entire property. I’ll talk about that later. Let’s start with the team weeks so I don’t start rambling. This will be long enough as it is.

Staff, team #1, and kids (pic by David Espinoza)

The first team was from Gateway, the same church that sent the last team we had in July. I had met the two team leaders on the July trip, so it was both fun to see them again and to meet the new people who came with them. I was nervous going into the week because I was totally in charge of the service projects for the first time (Debbie was still at least somewhat involved during the other team weeks), but it ended up being great! It was nice to have more autonomy and be able to adjust the plans based on how things were going without worrying about overstepping.

The team only had 8 people which, I have now decided, is the perfect size for a team. It was enough people to get things done but not so many that I had to manage like 20 projects at once. I had people working on just a few different things, giving me time to slow down and help with the work rather than having to constantly run from group to group to supervise.

One of the women is a hairdresser and gave everyone haircuts! Sooo… look at my hair! So long!

I’m donating it, so I laid my little ponytails out in my room to dry. Does this make me look like a psychopath?

They did a ton of little things here and there, but the big project of the week was to build a bamboo shade structure in the front entry area where the kids wait for their parents to pick them up and parents wait for meetings and such. In the summer, the sun is brutal, so without any shade, it’s not the most welcoming environment. I had some big dreams for how much work we could accomplish each day… I actually thought we would have the structure assembled by the end of the week. Ha! We only got as far as finishing the foundations and cutting/prepping the bamboo for the structure. Still, they did an awesome amount of work, and it was super precise which is the most important thing.

Patio pre-shade structure. Here we have the footer locations marked out, but my gosh I wish I had taken a picture of myself inside one of the foundation holes we had to dig. They were intense. Thankfully, the construction crew let us use their concrete mixer for the foundation concrete because otherwise, I think we would have finished one per day. Each hole took about 4 wheelbarrows of concrete to fill! Can you imagine hand-mixing that? NOT fun.

Cutting the bamboo for the shade structure

Bracing the columns. This is as far as team #1 got with the assembly.

Jocelyn, me, Julie, and Debbie. The team made these shirts to help fundraise for their trip, and they brought some for the whole staff!

One of the side projects: The endless job of fence-wickering. We use wicker, the same stuff they make wicker furniture out of, to help secure the posts, and the wrapping takes FOREVER. Approximately. (pic by David Espinoza)

Mural touch-ups! (pic by David Espinoza)

At the end of the week, it was sad to say goodbye to our new friends, but we had only four hours to mourn them in the airport food court before the next team arrived. Julie, Jocelyn, and I said hello to the next team with as much enthusiasm as our “it’s 1:30AM and we’ve been at the airport for five hours after an entire day out” selves could muster (for me, it was “not much”).

We walked around the hipster/artsy part of Lima, Barranco, where there are a bunch of funky murals.

The guy at the gelato place put so much effort into molding this beautiful swirl that I felt like I had to take a picture.

And so, team week #2 began! We got permission to skip the usual Sunday activities because we “looked like death” (accurate, I’m sure) and spent the day sleeping instead. That night, it was right back to work. Thankfully, the second team was similarly fun, small, and easy to work with, so what could have been a disaster of a week was actually pretty good. They kept working on the shade structure from the week before and got the frame assembled! They also rebuilt an entire bamboo fence and planted some ground cover… it was a busy week!

With the columns all braced, we filled up the bottoms with concrete to tie them in to the foundations. (See me in the back? With the hat and my fresh haircut.) (pic by David Espinoza)

Here’s the current status of the shade. We have to get a little more bamboo to finish off the structure, it needs to be treated with the insect stuff and varnished, and then we’ll put the shade on top… soooo we’re kind of close to being finished? ish?

Disassembling the fence to clean the posts and get rid of the termite-ridden pieces. (pic by David Espinoza)

Cleaning the fence posts (pic by David Espinoza)

We ended up having to replace more posts than expected, so we had to run to buy more bamboo in the middle of the week. How do you transport 6m bamboo in a van? Well, it looks something like this.

This is the view from my seat where I held onto the bamboo for dear life and prayed that it didn’t slide out of the back… and that I didn’t slide out of the back with it. We all survived.

Here’s the fence! You can see the new, green bamboo mixed in because that’s all we could get at the store, but it should dry out in a few weeks and will all be the same yellowish color. We still have a bunch of finishing work to do before the fence is truly complete, but since it looks pretty good, I’m pretending that it’s mostly done.

Planting more green! (pic by David Espinoza)

We all hibernated the weekend after they left. I felt like my brain was complete mush, plus I was physically exhausted from running around for two weeks (this is me giving you excuses for why I didn’t write an update that weekend).

We managed to sneak off to the beach for a couple hours one Saturday morning. You know, in an attempt to fool the world into thinking we have lives outside of work.

I would have loved to take it easy the next week and use that time to pull myself together a bit, but NOPE! No time for that! Like I mentioned before, Debbie and I had to update our drawings for the entire property to submit to the municipality. They’ve submitted drawings before, but the electrical drawings were a disaster. Besides the fact that I don’t think they look very nice, a lot of the information on them isn’t even correct! Or it doesn’t even make sense which gives me very little confidence in the people who are approving them. I suppose we could have just submitted similarly incorrect drawings again, but if you think I could ever convince myself to do that, you don’t know me at all.

And so, the next week and a half were spent mostly on that. Thankfully, the deadline kept getting pushed back. I thought originally that I was going to have 1 day to finish them. Now, I laugh that I ever imagined that was possible. I mean, I could have had SOMETHING done, but it would have been embarrassing. Instead, I spent 7 days squinting at my computer screen and tearing out my hair trying to understand the current drawings. Oh, and we had another surprise day off of school/work for All Saints’ Day… but I had to spend the day working because of the darn drawings. (Don’t talk to me about this as I’m still a smidge bitter.)

As a result of my weeklong vigil in front of my tiny computer screen, I’m pretty sure my brow is now permanently scrunched, and I have a hunchback and arthritis in my hands (no, I’m not dramatic at all. NEVER). So that’s good. But, what’s actually good is that my drawings are now finished, they look beautiful, and they’re kind of correct. And still kind of not correct, but it would take weeks of poking around the property and head scratching to fix all of the problems. (That’s one of my goals for the rest of my time here.)

Want to hear the worst story ever? Great, here it goes: Once upon a time, someone (who will remain nameless) dropped a mercury thermometer. It broke. The next 1.75 hours were spent cleaning up the mercury and estimating how many years the experience was cutting off the ends of our lives. The moral of the story? Don’t drop your mercury thermometer. And if someone else does, get outta there ASAP and don’t make the mistake of being a good friend and volunteering to help with the cleanup.

Finally, through all of this, the building project has gone on. We have walls! The drywall team has been hard at work putting up the interior walls, plus the few exterior walls that are drywall. They’ve also been installing the acoustic ceilings in the classrooms! We have a carpenter building the doors and window people making the windows. And the regular construction crew is still hard at work on the stucco and pouring the finished floors. We hired an electrician, and he’s getting ready to start pulling wires next week! And we went on a shopping trip to buy the classroom lights and some others, plus wire and outlets and eeee!! This is really happening!!! I’m excited. I’m terrified. I’m excited. I’m terrified. I’m only here for another month. AHHH!

Anyway, enjoy these pictures, and hopefully I’ll talk to you soon!

Let There Be Lights!

Too Many Things/I’m Tired