Day #2...you may as well call me Bobcat!

Hola!  Today it was HOT.  We had a pretty good day working on the playground.  We pobably won't see anywhere close to the completion of the playground.  Hopefully we'll get closer to seeing more of the wall done.  Today, my duties included picking up rock buckets, carrying rock buckets, lifting rock buckets, then carrying empty rock buckets back to get filled.  We made it almost to the end of the wall that's up.  We were back filling the wall with rock and laying a drainage pipe at the base.  We should be to the end tomorrow.  Then Monday we'll probably pour the top of the wall.

Here are some pics of our days events.

This is the playground.  As you can see we're weeks from any sort of slide or swings going up.  We won't see any fun on this playground...but that's not why we're here.  The green building at the top of the hill is the school that half the team is working on various painting projects.

The wall that we lift the bucket up to.

Ron working on tying the rerod together so we can lift it up to the top of the wall.

Dennis and Clyde "inspecting" the work.  You can see our buckets on the left that we filled and carried.

The walk to the lift area.  Walked it hundreds of times today.

Our valiant rock throwers.  They'd take the full buckets and spread the rock behind the wall.  We did 8" below the pipe, layed the pipe, then another 4" above.

This is the view from the pool.  The buildings you see are little luncheon areas that have charcoal grates for cooking.  I'll get a picture of the pool tomorrow.  It just so happened there were some not-so-modestly dressed ladies tanning on the hill behind me here...so I couldn't very well turn around and take a pic.

Overall it's been an eye opening experience.  I was talking with another guy on the trip and we were talking about our hometowns and th hispanic populations therein.  We both noticed (me more than him since he speaks some spanish) that when we were in our home towns, there are some first generation spanish speaking people that go into stores, don't speak a word, pay and leave.  They don't speak any english.  I always thought they just kept to themselves.  But today I went into a store to buy something to drink, the lady at the till knew I didn't speak spanish, was gracious and typed on a calculator what I owed.  It was 650 calones.  I paid with a large enough bill, she gave me my change, and I was off.  I didn't say a word the whole time I was there.  It wasn't that I didn't want to talk with them.  I do know a minimal amount of spanish.  But it was more of an intimidation factor. 

What really got me thinking was the minority representation in my hometown vs the "They live in America, they should speak english" camp.  I know we try and accomodate non-english speaking people in Worthington.  But I wonder how much we're missing out on because there's this huge language gap.  It's not that they want to keep to themselves, they want to interact and have conversations.  But they can't, just like I can't down here.  I wonder if more people in Worthington learned spanish, would there still be the cultural barriers wthin our community?  Would we be able to better approach the road blocks we encounter?  Would we be better able to unite as a city, county, state, and country if we bridged th language gap?

Being on the other side of the coin is an eye opening experience...but it's been good.

More tomorrow.

-Kyle