The week before Easter I (tyrone) went out to work at a local orphanage on my time off. I signed up for maintenance/concrete work. Well let me tell ya, the ride there and back almost did me in NOT the work!
Carl, who is a Dutchie, along with his wife are here helping build new places on some ground the orphanage acquired. The orphanage (that the Children live in now) is just a small walk from the ship port BUT the place where the new one is being built is what we call, ‘in the bush’.
Carl has this half motorcycle half mini-covered wagon thing that we (Tony an English man about 6’4 or 6’6 and three of the boys from the orphan) all piled into the back of. For the boys it was plenty of room and of course Carl was up front ‘riding’ the motorcycle part. But for Tony and I it was like riding as a hunchback on a hard metal bar while traveling thru a dried river bed for 45 minutes.
We mixed concrete and lay bricks till it really became too hot out to continue (I probably drunk at least 2 liters of water easily and sweated it back out!) and then we prepared for the ride back. Apparently there was a tow truck trying to pull one of those massive Mercedes workhorse trucks/vehicle out of a diagonal position after it slipped off the edge of the road, so we had to turn around and go another way after 20 minutes of back breaking bone jarring fun ride (ahem) in Carl’s Ladybug as he called it, thus stretching out our ride for a total of about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Yes, we stopped at the orphanage on the way back…but it was really like the old ‘bait and switch’ tactics of advertisement. Here we thought we would ride a mere 2 or 3 minute ride down the street, do some work while being inundated with children playing all around…yeah, not quite. Ha!
But it was good time, and we got to help work on the new place. I have some pictures from the orphanage with some of the other women that went from the ship specifically just for playing with the kids. Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of the actual site or motorcycle contraption we rode in because I felt it would not be very good on the camera if I brought it to do dirty work(and I made a great decision by not taking it too). It looked almost Identical to this, with us riding in the back!
I met 3 of the boys that worked with us – Aaron (who was the oldest at 15 although physical stature only looked 12) Peter, and Mo Mo Joe. (they looked to be about 8 and 10, but who knows?)
The following pictures are linked to bigger pictures. It is a new feature just added to the WordPress blog software I use to run my website.
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