TGIF

Today was all about the floor.

We arrived at the work site in gray  weather, looking like it was threatening to drizzle. But there was no real rain, and we got right to it. We'd stopped at the hardware store — a pretty big one, at that — to pick up two more shovels, another wheelbarrow, and a rake. We put them to use right away, hauling soil and stones into the church to level out the floor before pouring the cement. It took a lot of soil and stones to do it, but the floor took shape as load after load was placed and tamped down, and began to look more like a floor and not just ground that happened to have four walls built around it.

And then came the cement. Five and a half batches of it, hand mixed and bucketed into place, by a rotating crew of shovel wizards. I salute them. Oakley and Ted, who understand building, and Hector, the local contractor, received the cement bucket by bucket and smoothed it into place. It was a lot of work, but it went very fast — it kind of had to, to make the floor even — and the cement crews were kept at a lively pace. And at the end of the day there was a remarkable 3/4-finished floor that hadn't been there before.

Meanwhile, there was a little non-floor work that got done. Some of the fill for the floor came from the hillside beside the church on which I'd been working yesterday — and there was, really, a great deal more rock that needed to be broken up. So I spent some of the day with my trusty iron bar, prying rocks from the hillside, breaking bigger ones into littler ones (except the ones that wouldn't break, and had to be carried out in all their largeness), and in some cases just chipping away at solid stone one flake at a time. They need to dig down to the foundation level — where we built three years ago but some of which has gotten covered up again in the meantime — on order to relieve some moisture problems. And some of that digging will be close to solid rock. So, the solid rock has to go. I never knew I could derive so much satisfaction from the single moment when a rock, chipped at length, finally separates from the hillside. So many personal discoveries one makes on mission trips!

Tomorrow, being Saturday, is not a work day. This is a good thing: it will give the floor time to set, and my hands time to recover.