Week 3: Set in concrete...

Week 3 is done and dusted and my how time flies. This week we achieved a real milestone with the project and it feels so sad to know we only have a week left to go. I will definitely be back to see this house finished!

I started my week with a sleepover at Familia Moja. We arrived around 6 as the kids were returning from school and played with them until dinner. As always they managed to commandeer our cameras and went a bit snap happy but there were some great pictures shot in amongst the blurry and under/over exposed ones. After dinner we helped the kids with homework.

Trying to avoid being embarrassed when doing the math homework I helped them with their English homework which they are all pretty good at!

The kids playin' hairdresser with Netta

While we expected the foundations to only take a week or so we soon realised that there is much more work to be done.. Monday to Wednesday we  spent the days hardcoring the living/dining area and the kitchen area up the back of the building. This involved carting wheelbarrows full of smallish, pointy volcanic rocks on small plank in the dirt into towering piles where half a dozen of us would carefully stack them vertically trying to fill as many gaps as possible. Now that most of the volunteers had arrived there was a big group of us and the work was coming along faster.  Morning tea times were spent with the workers where for 10 bob you could buy a chipati or some maize porridge. Pretty sustaining and it is nice to break bread with the fundi (builders) and other labourers.

Tuesday night we decided it was about time we cooked dinner for the household for once and so a Mexican/Kenyan fusion as decided upon. Liv and Lucy took charge directing everyone to help with chopping, frying and rolling. We had burritos with salsa, guacamole and beans or mince using common Kenyan ingredients as to not put off the local palette. I made a vat full of cake batter and produced two industrial sized mango coconut cakes.

One went down to Familia Moja for the kids to enjoyed and  they inhaled it! The other was decorated and presented to Wambui whose birthday was the following day. While us mzungus (whities) relished a little familiar food the Kenyans still insisted on eating it in a more traditional way as opposed to folding the food up in tortillas.

By Thursday we were finishing all of our hardcoring and we were treated to a machine roller which compressed down all the rocks in a fraction of the time it would take us to do it manually. And finally we were ready to lay down the slab! This was a job for the fundis in the know  to do so we moved on to a much more revered tasks of uprooting coffee trees which made those 50 kg rocks look like a dream. While the trees looked small the roots were like thick logs and it took a lot of digging, hoeing and axing- about 1.5 hours-worth, just to uproot one! Mind you the fundis could do one on 20 mins!

The concrete slab- a solid slab of concrete that spans the whole floor plan- started being laid at 8 am and they worked well into the night on Friday finishing up around 9pm. This is a momentous time for the project as it means we are finished with the foundations and from here on in this should move pretty quickly. Walls will go up next week and to celebrate we will shout the boys a goat and a few crates of Tusker before we go to thank them for helping us so much.

Friday night the Muiru household graciously prepared some goats for most of the volunteers, while a few of the others headed into Nairobi for the weekend.  Our last volunteer Mark also arrived just in time for the weekend. Early next week we start to see a few volunteers head back home.

On Saturday James and Lottie assisted by some volunteers ran an art class with the kids at the Muiru house where everyone got a bit messy and some true masterpieces were created.

That night everyone headed to Komarock near Nairobi where we had a surprise party for Wambui.  All the volunteers were joined by dozens of family and friends and when Wambui arrived she got the shock of a lifetime. After many slurry renditions of happy birthday and cake we danced into the night and enjoyed mixing and mingling with other Kenyans, gushing to them about how much we love their country.