Digging foundations

Today we travelled down to the site to begin our first day of work. Although it was rainy pretty heavy this morning we headed down anyway and began work!! Some of the local people worked with us all day - they are involved with habitat and all of them will be getting one of the houses that we will be working on. The great thing is that no-one knows what house they are getting - so everyone puts in equally as much work into every house.

We worked away all day - fully getting the foundations dug out for one house and working on another once this was finished. Due to lack of drainage it was a task getting the water out of some of the holes which were already dug. It was rewarding when we finally got one house finished. The women in the community gave us warm popcorn and coffee for a morning break as well which was great - everyone is so kind. We even get to experience outside toilets when we are at the site... Much to everyone's amusement.

We had great fun with the locals - their English is really good!! A few children even showed us how they could count up to 10 in English, they were only about 4! We as a group were really surprised at how much we integrated with the locals - joining together to complete tasks. Even though there was a language barrier - we managed to learn quite a few words in The local language. Gary even discovered his name means horse and cart haha!! To top the day off Zee took us to a reggae restaurant for our dinner - everyone loved it! When we got home Julie used her personal training techniques and took us through a few stretches for our muscles after the work today.

Looking forward to going back to the site tomorrow to see everyone!  Update on bag situation:Gary's bag came through today for the airport... Still waiting on 5 more bags to come through which is a bit of a downer but Everyone is in high spirits and we are all sharing :)  with Gary and Jim rocking their 'international fashion' purchases for a little shop in addis!!

Ps: lesson for today = wear suncream tomorrow... Everyone has farmer tan/burn tonight.

More photos to follow...