This weekend I had the opportunity to go to Shell with a group from Emaus to work at La Casa De Fe. I won’t give the history I could on either group, I’ll just skip to the part about what we did this weekend.
It was pretty amazing to see the “Promised Land” after having been absent from the property for two years. When I was last there, it was a patch of tall grass, a stream, and a backhoe. Now there’s a completed water tower and bodega, and a significantly constructed multi-purpose building. The entire concrete framework of the building is done, to the point that we were able to camp out under tents and misquito nets on the top floor as we worked on the first floor.
I’ve been saying today that this weekend was probably the most work I’ve ever done in my life. I’m trying to think of a time that could beat it, and I haven’t come up with one yet. We shoveled out and leveled the dirt under the first floor, dumped in bigger rocks that won’t hold water, covered it with a layer of plastic and rebar-like metal grate material, then mixed and poured concrete for the real floor of the ground level. Part of that involved carrying around 50-kilogram bags of cement to mix concrete.
Now, being your typical kid from the United States, the only metric conversion I know how to do in my head is miles to and from kilometers, and I only know that because of a minor road trip I took to Canada with my grandpa during which I sometimes drove. It wasn’t until after I’d staggered around carrying three or four of those bags that I discovered that it’s more than a 2:1 ratio of kilograms to pounds. I don’t even weigh very much more than 50 kilograms.
Needless to say, between that and the shoveling and pushing wheelbarrows of concrete and sleeping on a constantly deflating air mattress on more concrete, I’m more than a little sore right now. But since I don’t plan an exercise regimen of shoveling concrete and rocks every weekend to keep up these muscles that I didn’t know I had, I’m glad about some other things with which I came away from this weekend.
At certain points it was hard being out at the new property basically all the time and trying to think of it as a ministry site and not just a work site. But when we did finally have the chance to go over to the orphanage, and then to have a bunch of the kids come out to the property to have a worship service with us this morning, it drove home one of those things that I did come away with. Twice now, after having seen the property when it was a piece of land indistinguishable from the rest of the jungle around it, I’ve gotten to be a part of building a place that’s there only because of people acting out God’s love, and which will soon be not just a building, but a home full of that love.
