Building houses from rebar and concrete blocks, always interesting. Today we were down in a little village building a small three room house for a woman and her four children. The lives of these women in the rural parts of the country is hard living like you can’t believe. One of the realities like carrying water from the closest water source, another is trying to fine firewood to cook with daily. In this small village I saw something I’ve never seen before. There are tall evergreen trees everywhere. The small children, as young as five years old, take a machete and shimmy up these trees to cut down branches for firewood. The little girls are in their traditional dress, fitted skirts that go down to their knees. They tuck these long machete knives into their belts and scoot up the trunk of the tree thirty or forty feet. Unbelievable. I will try to post a few pics of this, but it’s remarkable and crazy dangerous at the same time.
Lunch time approached. The lunches consist of loaves of bread and a ziploc bag of sandwich meat, cheese, etc. A couple of the men asked if a few of the women could help make lunchtime a bit more civilized. We work with some of the indigenous men, and the North American men don’t like the fact that the indigenous men take a pee in the cornfield, never use hand-sanitizer and then stick their hands into the bread bag and lunchmeat bag to make their sandwiches. So a couple of us washed our hands thoroughly and set out to make lunch time a bit more hygienically acceptable for all. With my freshly sanitized hands I took the ziploc bag out of the cooler which had the lunchmeat in it. Apparently it wasn’t zipped shut and the entire bag of meat dumped out into the dirt and started rolling down the hill. I was chasing the rolling ham like a crazy person trying to beat the stray dogs to it, which I did. My other lunch prep person saw what happened as I brought the dirt caked lunchmeat up the hill. We made an executive decision that the guys just didn’t want pee on their sandwiches and said nothing of dirt. We washed off the meat, gave the outside pieces to the dogs, and finished preparing for lunch. I hope that was the right decision. No one got sick, so I guess it was. When in Guate…
We served the family lunch. They sat on a log in front of the building site. Oh the cultural differences when it comes to garbage. Here you throw garbage on the ground unless you’re a gringo. So the family ate and threw the wrappers from the cookies, chips, napkins, cups on the ground directly in front of them. It distracted the entire team during lunch watching them do this. All heads turned as each piece of garbage was tossed to the ground. As soon as the family went back into the house, everyone scrambled to pick up the garbage, then breathed a sigh of relief that all was back in order.