This morning started very early for a portion of our group – Jennifer, Ashley, Sheri, Amanda, Diana and Sarah surprised even themselves by getting up at 5:30 for a walk to the beach to watch the sunrise (well, not sunrise exactly – we were facing West – let’s call it a dayrise). It was well worth it! The morning was beautiful – watching the waves roll in, heat lightening flashing through the clouds, the dogs roaming the beach and the daylight come up was amazing. After many pictures, creation of some sand art by Sheri and wading in the water we headed back for breakfast.
After breakfast we all met up – bags in tow – for our trip to the Andaburi Resort in Phang Nga – it was about a 2 hours drive. After those two hours, a few more moments of bated breath while driving and some beautiful scenery we made it to our hotel and had time to explore the area and get unpacked before meeting up with our gracious HFH Thailand hosts for our welcome and orientation. HFH Thailand has been doing amazing work in Thailand in the next 4 years plans to build 1500 more houses with families living in poverty housing. This area we are working was also hit hard by the devastating tsunami a few years ago and Habitat has been a key player in the rebuilding efforts here.
Orientation was followed by a traditional Thai lunch – again it was amazing – then we got dressed and ready to head to the job site. We were excited to see that rather than riding in the vans we’d been transported in up to this point, we are going to utilize the local open air taxi trucks to go to and from the job site everyday. As Anne, our HFH Thailand host told us, they want to support the local services as much as possible. No complaints from us!
The job site is about 35 minutes from our hotel and we arrived there at 1pm for a welcome, introduction to Jiresek and work! Anne served as our translator while Jiresek introduced himself and expressed his gratitude and appreciate to all of us. He spoke humbly and briefly, but it was obvious he was excited and appreciative of this opportunity to move his 8 person family out of his 2 room (1 bedroom) rental house and into this soon to be new, safe, and sturdy house.
Now it was time to get to work! We started with mixing cement for the footers which entailed shoveling sand, cement mix, water and gravel into containers and them carrying them to the cement mixer. Everything is done by hand and hard work and we all realized within minutes that the intensity of the sun and the high humidity made it critical to stop frequently – every 15 minutes or so – for a water break. We were sweating faster than we could wipe it off and definitely jumped right into working hard and getting dirty! After mixing several batches of cement and bucketing it to the already dug footers, we moved on to the task of moving old, used concrete blocks into the foundation of the house, then using hammers to break them up into smaller pieces so that tomorrow we can spread it evenly over the area where the concrete slab will go on top of it. It was explained that we will spread the broken concrete pieces, and then carry sand to pour in and level it off before we will mix and pour the concrete over it all to create the slab foundation. Sounds like a lot of work we will be doing tomorrow!
At 3:45pm it was time for cleanup before heading back to the hotel. Hard to believe we had worked for only 2 ½ hours and we were all so exhausted! Tomorrow will be our first whole day of work and it will certainly be challenging, just as this afternoon was.
The rest of the evening was spent cleaning up, going to the beach/pool, and having dinner - Pizza this time :) Then we all headed to bed to get prepared for along day tomorrow!
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