Wednesday, February 24, 2010

At the Construction Site

While we were in Boracay, we worked at the construction site for the new ministry center (medical and dental clinics, Christian school, adult Bible classes) for four days. The couple of Filipino men who are in charge of the project took pity on the women and gave us the least strenuous job, cutting and twisting wire for tying re-bar joints. Here we are in action, and below are the guys using the wires we'd cut to secure the re-bar frames for cement pillars on the second level of the structure.
I mentioned in an earlier post that there was a group of students and faculty from a Christian school in Korea that were also working at the site. Our kids joined them in shoveling sand and gravel for concrete into buckets to haul up to the second level, where the cement for the new pillars was to be mixed and poured.

Madelyn was pleased to get a chance to be part of the bucket brigade.The guys may have had the most fun on the demolition aspects at the construction site. A portion of an old building remained on the site that needed to be removed in order to complete the second level of the new structure. Sledge hammer, jack hammer... they were all over it! Pretty cool to get to try these things and see real demolition happen.

Gwen did amazingly well for all the hours we were at the site. She did try her hand at wire cutting, pictured here, but it was really pretty tough to do, especially for her. We used her services as a runner, to carry completed twists of wire up to those who needed it on the second level. Gwen makes friends wherever she goes, and she quickly had several of the high school students from the Korean school wrapped around her little finger. She also found some local kids who hung out around the site to be good playmates.
Ah, one more task. The guys worked together to coil this re-bar into a spring-like shape to create the framework for additional pillars.
It was pretty cool to work at this site and see that we really did help make progress. I loved that our boys got to do some pretty strenuous physical labor... that's got to be good for character development, I think! Before we left Boracay, we stopped back at the site to see the completed pillars with the frames removed. We'd love to help organize some teams from Concordia and our church to go to Boracay to help further the progress on this much-needed facility. Who knows, maybe our family will even get to go again. It was indeed a privilege.

5 comments:

park it said...

Gwen gets more pretty and so grown up each time I see her!

What are the black designs the kids have on? not henna?

Jennifer J said...

what an opportunity Lynne. Thanks for sharing!

Ruth Buck said...

Wow! You guys look great! I'd love to recruit you to work on MY jobsites! Looks like a wonderful experience and probably most impactful for many years to come. Awesome that you were able to do this as a family. Thanks for sharing.

Sarah Jane said...

That is really neat! It would be fun to go back to see it in use.

Mark Erdmann said...

Ummm, I'm assuming Caleb didn't get a real tatoo, did he? It is pretty cool though. Tell him I like it.