Why hello there! Remember me? Sorry it's been a while since I've done a blog, been kept busy for another week. Was going to do a blog on Sunday but my laptop's power chord broke, so I'm having to do this week's blog in the internet cafe!! The big news this week is that I sort of have a girlfriend now, but more on that later!!

Hey Good Looking, Whatcha Got Cooking?!
On Monday morning I packed up all the tools we needed for building form boards for Jhean Carlos' house, only to find out half an hour before we were due to set off that he hadn't bought the wood for the boards yet. So after putting the tools away, I signed up for kitchen duty. This entailed going to the market with Simon, the kitchen manager/head chef and getting ingredients, then chopping up all the vegetables and meat in the morning, before finally putting it all together in the afternoon and cooking it. We made pad thai, which was a lot more simple than it seemed. I had a pretty emotional time in the morning when I had to grate a load of onions, but I pulled myself together to chop spring onions and peeled some prawns! After eating the beautiful meal I had prepared in the evening, we had an "all hands" meeting, where all the volunteers sat around the fire and discussed some new ideas for the organisation. Not an awful lot got discussed in the two hours or so of the meeting, but I got to learn a fair bit about PSF and its predecessor Burners Without Borders. Shortly afterwards I headed to Bedfordshire.

The same thing happened on Tuesday as Monday, with the call coming in again half an hour before we were due to set off. Feeling pretty frustrated I decided to head up Pedro's house for the day. I had worked there once about a month ago, at which time they had just finished the foundations. When I arrived I saw that they had finished the walls and roofed one of the rooms. On the agenda for Thursday was doing the roof on the other room, chiselling off bits of loose concrete from one of the columns and plastering one of the other columns. With a couple of projects cancelled for that day we had way too many people for the project but at least we got all the work we needed doing done. On the night we had our weekly game of football with the tour guides, which, with the exodus of many of our key players the week before, we dutifully lost! It was a couple of the volunteers' birthdays on Tuesday so we went for a quick drink at the Pisco Sour Bar, before heading back to bed.

At Long Last!!
On Wednesday we finally got the all clear to start work on the form boards for Jhean Carlos' foundations. We first had to finish filling in the trenches with concrete, which we had also been filling on the previous Friday and Saturday, officially making them the least structurally sound foundations in Pisco!! After a swift hour or so of hard work, we had to stop because we had run out of aggregate to mix with the cement. So after a quick break we started nailing together the newly acquired planks of wood into the usable form boards. After finishing them, we had a quick break while we waited for the new aggregate to arrive. At about 12.30, the truck came, so we started the mixer again and we were soon finished. After a long awaited lunch (it was now about 2pm by this point), we put two of the form boards up before calling it a day.
In the evening we forfeited Music night and tool time to watch a video of the earthquake that had hit Pisco in 2007. There were two parts to the movie, one was a home video taken by a man in the immediate aftermath of the quake, who was using the camera as a light source to rescue a man who was buried in rubble. The other part was a series of news bulletins covering the earthquake and showing bodies and the general destruction the earthquake had left. This was pretty harrowing and made me feel the importance of the work we were doing to rebuild Pisco.

On Thursday returned to JC's house. In the morning we were shown how to put up the boards by the maestro, so we had another long morning putting up boards before we stopped for lunch. In the afternoon we called the truck in with the mixer. After a couple of teething problems getting the older, more temperamental mixer started, we were soon underway and finished pouring in a couple of hours. After waiting for the truck for about half an hour we headed home. In the evening we had another game of football with the tour guides for some reason beyond me!! We lost again despite my valiant hat-trick!! More drinks by the fire then insued before going to bed.

That Friday Feeling
When Friday came around we went back to Jhean Carlos' house to finish off the rest of the raised foundations. We had to take out the boards we had laid the day before, then we hit a wall. Not literally, but the planks we had were too long for the shorter bits of wall that needed building and with the planks being borrowed, we could not cut them either. We made one new board from scraps of wood while we waited for the maestro, who eventually returned and told us how to solve the problem. So after undoing some of the wire on the metal columns we fed the form boards through the gaps and finished off making the moulds. After Lunch I went to fetch the mixer, but with no truck around, AJ and I had to pull the massive two tonne thing on the back of a tricycle!! This was pretty hard work, but we managed. Our hearts sank when, after all of that effort, the mixer would not start. With Pete, the tools manager away, Michael, another experienced member of the team came to help. After a lot of effort he couldn't get it started. He did however manage to break the rope, putting end to any plans of finishing the foundations on that day!!
On the evening me and a few others got some "climax", a Peruvian alco-pop, made infintely better by the countless innuendos and double-entendres about orgasms!! After an early start drinking, we were nice and merry for the pub quiz JUles and Meg, two Australians had organised. Being Aussies, they added one question to every round that only Australians could know the answer to!! This mean that "Team Climax in Your Mouth" only came a valiant third! After another bottle of climax I genuinely can't remember what happened for the rest of the night!! That stuff is only 7% but it does the job!!

On Saturday we had a half day to do the cement pouring we were supposed to do on Friday afternoon. This was pretty straight forward, although we also had to make a couple more small form boards ourselves before we got our hands dirty cement mixing for the rest of the morning.

Summer Lovin'
On the evening Will and Quinn organised a Pisco Pub Crawl. We started the night at the PSF house with a few drinks, some music and a game of cards before we headed into town for our first destination. Following tradition We started at the Pisco Sour Bar, where we had a quick drink before being hurried on to our next destination which was a bar I hadn't been to since my first weekend in Pisco (which I can't remember the name of!). After another quick drink there our next destination was Enigma, which was an appropriate name since it was a place I hadn't yet been to! I was suprised to see that it was a huge nightclub that wouldn't look out of place in England!! In fact it easily beats the Gallery and Ziggy's hands down! It also had an upstairs section which was about six foot high, meaning my head was touching the ceiling! After chilling in the upstairs area for a while we then headed to the dance floor. It was at this point I started dancing with Kate, one of the newish arrivals at PSF, who had been working with me at Jhean Carlos' house during the week. I was teaching her the very limited Salsa skills that I had picked up whilst I have been in Peru, before we moved on to the Afro-cafe where the inevitable happened and Kate and I had a bit of a snog!! After getting some dodgy burgers from a street vendor we headed back to the house, where we found Conor had drunkenly started up another fire, which we sat by for a while before I kissed Kate good night!!

Ouch That Stings!!
On Sunday I got up fairly early and made breakfast. After a couple of hours gossipping at the house (mainly about me!) we headed off for a trip to the beach. We had a bit of a sun-bathe before jumping in the sea for a swim. This turned out to be a bad idea as my new paramour apparantly stood on a stingray and got stung in the foot. A couple of locals came to help and told her to go to hospital. This cut short our beach trip and I spent the rest of the afternoon worrying while Kate was taken to the Cuban doctors!! She returned after an hour or so bandaged up, although still hobbling a bit, so we went to grab some dinner from a restaurant down the road. At night I cashed in my night in Simon's room that I had won at the silent auction the week before, so after sorting through a bunch of films in Spanish, Kate and I got some snacks in and watched Year One and Leon before heading our seperate ways again.

With Jhean Carlos' house on hold again, I spent Monday making a temporary house with Mick, the woodyard manager. we were building the kind ogf house that we usually move people out of, but this family had their house burned down and were now living with neighbours. Dominique and I started digging holes for some wooden support columns while Mick and Lise-Anne fetched some big wooden 4x4s from the wood yard. We then put the beams in the ground and started to attach the plywood and bamboo panels to the columns. This was a pretty interesting days work, with it being a completely new construction method. In the evening I sat by the fire and had a few beers. Standard!

This morning (Tuesday) I went with Mick back to the temporary house, only to find that they had not brought the panel of wood we were depending on, meaning we couldn't do any work today, meaning I had the morning off to do an extra special long blog which only my parents will manage to get to the end of!!!

Been yet another awesome week, and it's shaping up to be another awesome week this week, as we have the next two days off for Peruvian Independence Day, then at the weekend I'm organising another trip to Huacachina which should be wicked fun!! Gonna try and steal some photos to put up this week so stay tuned!!