This morning at breakfast it dawns on me that I have had a good night sleep as for the first time the rooster was silent, I ask prince why this is and he brings the rooster to the table. Not realising at first glance but I could see something was different but not sure what, they had sliced the comb on his head off clean to teach him a lesson for being stubborn. Hmm Ghanaians have strange ways of doing things but this discipline obviously worked on the rooster and he hasn't been the same since!

It's been a long week on construction but the instant satisfaction of seeing the build go up keeps me going and I soon realise I am a lot stronger than I originally thought. My two other volunteers Kelly and Tom have both admitted on first impressions they thought I would last a night but I have surpassed their expectations and surprised them with my work ethos. (Which is get the job done and nap). The first week took a lot of getting used to the early starts and going straight into work from breakfast, the only way I can describe construction is like doing a six hour bootcamp session a day. My body feels physically strained but I don't want to let it show and my perseverance soon started to pay off as I got stronger. Each day prince (our onsite entertainment I like to think of him as) checks the muscles on my arms while I tense and laughs aponto (which means bulls***) but I'm adamant they have grown.

This week we have done a complete variation on the compound which I am glad off as brick laying can become very monotonous and painful the higher you have to lift the bricks. At the beginning of the week we spent the day laying bricks to make the walls around the site for security. This started off easy and painless until our walls got higher to lift up, I will try anything once but I decided it was safer to be the brick passer. When I say bricks I don't mean small red bricks these are massive, heavy concrete blocks that we made the previous week in brick moulds which was another heavy task.

It gets more exciting I made cement for the floor which we laid on the front porch of the dining room and plaster for the walls, everything that we use on site and make, is made from mortar and cement. I don't know much about building however I am sure at home we use different mixes for bricks, plaster, concrete, etc but here it seems we mix a hell of a lot of sand, cement and swamp water. We use the same mixes but just different ratios depending on what are making for example, without showing off; to make plaster you would use two wheel barrows of sand, one cement and one rocky type stuff and water. We have a big tank of construction water that is collected from the stream, which often has fish in so we tend to mix fish in with the cement too.

Onsite we have a foreman Ebo who is there to guide us and tell us what he wants us to do, he normally tells us what he wants mixed and then we just follow his lead. He knows his stuff and he's great but he doesn't say much apart from I'm coming and wo wo don't put that there. He calls me lady despite telling him my name several times however as we have become better acquainted he tells me this is because he wants to say lazy not lady! Then there is prince who is also there to help but he often stands watching us laughing, he thinks it's hilarious to watch me sweat buckets into the concrete. He keeps the moral up onsite when you feel like your about to collapse or stop with exhaustion he will do something stupid to keep you going, we have tried to teach him some new words even though his English is excellent, he insists on swearing a lot. I joke and say he doesn't do much but he is very good at helping us do the stuff we can't do and stops us from wasting precious mortar by intervening when we are about to get mixes wrong, even though he tends to waste it making concrete balls To chuck at us if we slack.

Plastering has always looked easy to me and when asked if I have had any experience in this I had to question whether poly filling a hole and smoothing over with a credit card counts. After making the mix nice and sloppy for slapping, Ebo gives us a brief demo on plastering and leaves us to it. He slaps into onto the wall at lightening speed and smooths over, finishing off with a wooden stick to level and countless rubbing with a wooden block in circular motion for the final touches. We decide it looks easy enough and assure Ebo he can leave it in our capable hands, I think there was something wrong with the mix because it was not sticking at all. I have always used the phrase if you throw enough s*** at the wall something will eventually stick' and that is so true to plastering and estate agency! We were all hopeless at it and with most of it on the floor or in our mouths, some hours later some stuck and we completed our first wall all smooth and ready to be painted. I looked back at the wall and felt proud that we managed to finish and it was bloody hard without the proper tools and mix but it still looked good enough to paint.

Making bricks, yes of course it is more mortar, water and just another ratio of mix. I feel as if I have done a lot of shovelling, shifting and mixing which I think covers most tasks I have done without boring you half to death. Bricks can be bought here but they are expensive and small therefore we make our own onsite and it makes it just that bit more satisfying when laying them out. Once a very, very heavy mix is made up and flipped several times over you then shovel heaps of the mix into a mould (which you only have one of so it can take a while) you pack the mix in tight, carry it across the yard looking like your going to poo yourself as it's heavy weight jerks your walk off slightly, you then tap the mould upside down like a sandcastle and then after some hours of drying you have yourself a brick.

Meal times and naps are what I now live for as soon as breakfast is over my mind turns to what's for lunch, the work is so hard and I feel so hungry all the time and the food comes in extremely large portions. It's nice to sit at the table three set times a day with people and socially eat together, each meal that comes out is a real surprise. Tina serves our food with a plate over the top which I lift like a closh to see what lurks beneath, sometimes it looks like something you see on the pavements on a Sunday morning (sorry Tina, your an amazing Cook I'm sure of it) and others you can be pleasantly surprised with plain rice and plantain chips. We ask for kitty kitty portions which means small, generally means not American size please and absolutely no spice which means a little in Ghanaian terms. There is so much fresh fruit to have too which is great but if you ask for some pineapple or a banana you are given a whole chopped one, or a plate of six bananas sliced.

The afternoon naps are amazing too, each day after work around lunch I slope off to my bunk bed for a power hour, the heat is so hot around the afternoon that you can't do much else. There is something comforting about mid day naps, perhaps it's my early memories of baby naps but i'll definitely miss them when I go back to the real world. Which I have already started to think about most days, the realisation that I gave up my job to come here, the thought of the unknown and worries of what I'm returning to if anything. Locals often ask if i'm mad to come out here and work for free, they just can't get their heads around why we would want to do that. My reply to them is always the same, that I am fortunate to have everything I need and I would like to give what I can to help someone else, this soon stumps them and starts for a million more questions.

I have learnt many things since coming here and been offered advice at the plenty, I have learnt that I enjoy building and would like to one day build myself a house. Unlikely. Advice given by colleagues and volunteers, don't go anywhere near a building site again.
Jokes aside coming here I have been lucky enough to find something that I really enjoy, I don't think I can say it was the heavy duty lifting or the covering myself in plaster but I have realised that if you stick at something and work hard enough at it there can be satisfaction found in everything you do with the right attitude.