Monday, October 1 - Brigade Day One, Part Two

So, as I said in the previous post, Brian and Ben were assigned to "Concrete" on the first day of Brigade.  After we arrived at the church and set out begin, the team who was on concrete set out to the home of the recipients of the concrete floor.  They all piled into the back of a truck and headed up the hill.   

 When they arrived, they took in the sight of the home for which they were going to put in the concrete floor. The home was basically made of cinder block and wood planks with a corrugated tin roof.  The house was one room, 12' x 14' and housed a family of eight people, a father (40) and mother (50) and their eight children (19, 16, 14, 10, 7, 3).  Brian said that he spotted at least three geckos also living in the house with the family :-)

The windows were boarded up and it was dark and damp inside. The family had one TV, two electrical outlets and one two-burner stove top to cook with.  There was a single light bulb hanging from the center of the room. What is considered a house in Honduras wouldn't even qualify as a tool shed to most of us in the USA and yet in this home lived an entire family.  Even more difficult, especially for Brian, was that he noted that the family had removed all of their belongings from the house (as they were instructed to do) and they basically made a small heap out back.  The most difficult for him to stomach were the two mattresses, a double and a single.  He said that they were in terrible shape, especially the single-sized mattress, which was  reduced to mostly rags; it was that dilapidated! It was difficult to imagine eight members of a family having to sleep on these filthy rags that would only qualify as burning material here at home.  Oh, how we wish we were doing more than just giving them a concrete floor!

This is the Concrete Team with two of the family members of the house (man in purple shirt and young boy in orange shirt).  The two men squatting down are Honduran and they work for the World Gospel Outreach organization.  They facilitate the concrete assignments and also act as translators.  Before beginning the work, Ben prayed ... (oh, did that ever make me proud when I heard this) ... he prayed for blessings upon the family and for the work they were there to do.

So, according to Brian, this is how the concrete floor was put into this house: 

"First, we would level the dirt floor as best we could and we would hit the floor with a flat tool called a tapper.  It has a flat plate of metal attached to a pole and you would let the flat part hit the dirt floor, packing it down and making it somewhat flat and level.  Next, we would bring in three- 5 gallon buckets of sand, then do the same with stone and then repeat again with the sane.  Then we would put half a bag of concrete mix on top of the pile.  Then we repeated the sand, stone, sand, concrete mixture forming a big pile.  Four people would start, two on each side of the pile, to manually mix up the sand-stone conglomeration.  This is done until the four people meet in the middle.  Then we would start in the middle and turn the mix over again going away from each other until it was all mixed together.

Then we would take the pile and form somewhat of a big bowl with it and then we would start to add water. We put a shovel into the middle of the "bowl" and poured the water onto it so that we would not create a hole in the dirt floor.  We would add water and move the mixture into the water a little at a time so as not to have the water all run out.  Once it was as full as we could get it, we would break a wall of the "bowl" and start to mix like crazy to get all the water and sand/stone/concrete mixed together.  Then we would move the concrete to where we needed it up against the wall and into the form that we created after leveling the floor.  When the concrete was in place, we used a big 8-foot square bar to move it side to side with two people to make the floor smooth and level to the forms that we put down.  Then we would have two people use hand trowels to do the final smoothing-out process.  That would be one section to the process and we had to do this process about six or seven times in that home."

... gathering the sand ...

People who lived nearby came over to find out what was going on ....

This was a giant rock that had to be busted up and removed in order to level the floor.

In the left of the photo below, the small, brick-enclosed area with a blue tarp above it is where the family keeps their water; please note that it is not a well but does act as a type of cistern.

The boy in the photo below is Isaac; he is seven years old.  He actually helped out a lot.  During the time of sharing that evening, Ben got really choked up because this task was one of the most laborious jobs he's ever done and he admitted that it was hard work; he was tired and he was sore.  Those 5-gallon buckets were heavy when they filled them with dirt, sand and rocks!  But Isaac got right in there with the rest of them and he did the work ... with a SMILE ... not because he had to ... but because he wanted to be included, to be a part of what was going on. And Ben said, "that 7-year-old boy was stronger then me!"

He was somewhat ashamed of the realization that a family of eight people LIVE in this house, a 12x14 room that is not impenetrable from the elements ... and back home he has a bedroom bigger than this house, with carpet and painted walls ... all to himself!

The experience was obviously very sobering for those on the Concrete Team!

The floor ... starting to take shape!  The concrete was laid two inches thick.

Rick, one of the team members who also speaks Spanish, took an opportunity to share with the father of the family ... Rick presented the Gospel to the man and he believed!

Woo Hoo!!!

Ahh, ... the finished product!  Pretty nice, huh?  

"Well done, my good and faithful servant(s)." (Matthew 25:23)