Day One on the Job

Today was our first day of work, and it's telling in my muscles and my stamina!

We are working this year at Santa Cruz church in the community of Nueva Esperanza, where we've worked the previous two years as well. It was a nice feeling to have the bus pull up to the site today — kind of like returning to an old friend. There'd been some work done on the building since the last time we were here: the roof is on, and the interior dirt floor had been leveled some (I think). But it's still not much more than a shell. I understand that there hasn't been much money available — the Honduran branch of Episcopal Relief and Development, which helped provide funding for Santa Cruz, has had to shut down — and without that support the local community was not able to keep on working on the church much between our visits. When we arrived there were bags of cement and boxes of tile sitting inside, waiting for us, purchased, as I believe, with the money we sent on ahead. And that means our main goal this trip will be to fill, level, cement, and tile the floor. Big job!

In order to get that job started, though, some of us were detailed in the morning to go to the side of the church, where the flat place for the building had initially been dug out of the hillside, and to dig out some more to get extra fill for leveling the floor. We actually took down a good bit of the hillside, trying to square it from the surface all the way down to the floor level, and then transporting the rubble we'd made to the altar end of the church. At one point in the day I conceived a real admiration for my Cornish ancestors, who dug in deep rock for tin since the dawn of recorded history, as I was breaking large rocks into smaller rocks with an iron bar, in order to dislodge them from the hillside and add to the rubble pile beneath.

We broke for lunch, and this year,  for the first time, we sat down to eat right in the shell of the church rather than moving up to the porch of a nearby house, as we had the two years before. There was something particularly satisfying about breaking bread together in the place we were building for the breaking of bread.

After lunch it was cement time. I am still not entirely used to making cement on the ground using nothing but shovels and lots of muscle. Seven wheelbarrows of sand, two sacks of cement, seven buckets of water, and a definite rhythm of shoveling the dry into the wet, turning it over and mixing it up, each shovelful getting heavier as more water soaks in. We made enough to cover the altar area at the front off the church — and that still leaves the entire nave for later in the week! I can see that we have our work well cut out for us.

So tonight I'm sitting here with aching forearms — for some reason those muscles reacted worst to the digging bar and the shovel — and rapidly encroaching sleepiness, but also with a real sense of joy to be here in Copan again, seeing friends from before, enjoying the beauty of this valley in the mountains, and doing good work for a church we've known from the ground up.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring...