Hello there, sorry it's been a while since my last blog, has been another rollercoaster week! Let's see if I can remember what's been happening over the last week and a bit!! The projects that I have been leading are still on hold, so I've been hopping from one project to another again this week.

Back to Aceros Arequipa
On Wednesday I returned to Aceros Arequipa, the big steel mill to collect wood to be made into panels for the modular housing project. We hopped in a bus and got dropped outside the plant. After meeting up with Leeward, the head of the environmental department, we were shown to a big metal cage on the outskirts of the plant where we collected a load of wooden pallettes and some big wooden boxes that we later loaded into a truck which took them back to PSF HQ to be put into the wood yard. This was pretty quick work, so we were finished by about 1.30pm, meaning I had the afternoon free to chill out at the house for a while. I later went to the internet cafe for a bit before going to dinner. After dinner we had Music Night, before I headed to bed.

After leading the morning meeting in Spanish again on Thursday, I signed up to help do the concrete pour on the roof for the new dorm that I was building the metal columns for on Tuesday. To start with I was carrying buckets of cement from the mixer in front of the the house up to the roof, but after half an hour or so I took over running the cement mixer, which I carried on doing until it was finished. With my ankle still a little swollen from the previous week's football I declined to play football on Thursday night and instead played some card games whilst having a few beers, before heading for an early night.

On Friday I headed to Catherine's house to work on levelling the floor and to remove some form boards from the columns that were poured the previous day. However there were several problems at the house, firstly that the maestro had not come to finish up all of the plumbing and had not left instructions on which pipes needed connecting where and secondly that the cement columns were not yet dry, but needed taking out as they were borrowed and in need of returning. After debating with Catherine with my slightly limited Spanish skills and even more limited understanding of the project, we called for Thays, the project manager to come and intervene. After hammering out the details, we concluded that we would leave the floor to be levelled another day and that we would reluctantly take the form boards off the columns. After about an hour of removing form boards, we had lunch before returning back to the house. Friday night was pretty eventful; I had organised a big game of poker, with proceeds going to PSF, meanwhile the inauguration of the new roof was happening (according to Peruvian tradition if there is no party after a roof is built it will fall down!!) After smashing a bottle of wine on the roof to inaugurate the roof we started the poker tournament. I got off to a good start, but as usual I ran out of luck and ran into pocket aces, continuing my dismal run of form at PSF!! Dejected, I went to join in the festivities in the common room, where they were partying the night away! After the poker tournament ended a big group of us went into town to the karaoke bar for Kate and her friends' last night. Well I say karaoke bar.... it had a karaoke machine with a couple of CDs of terrible songs and a broken microphone!! We still had some good laughs and after grabbing some food from a street vendor we all headed home.

Hasta Luego!!
On Saturday I volunteered to do the house clean again, meaning another short morning of washing windows and cleaning the kitchen before sneaking off and having a quick power nap! I woke up to the sound of people leaving to get lunch, so I quickly tagged along. We got some chicken and rice from a restaurant down the road before heading back. An hour or so later I was saying my goodbyes to Kate and her friends who were heading off to go travelling around Peru and eventually Bolivia. My sadness was short lived however as Anton, Yani, Gino and Emily started up some drinking games in the evening, leading to an entertaining night of drinking, boxing in the common room (where I totally pounded Anton) and a "rave" at the school house, which devolved into drinking in Yani and Emily's room!! Feeling sufficiently cheered up, I headed to bed.

Feeling particularly lazy on Sunday I ended up spending the vast majority of the day watching movies in the common room with half a dozen or so others. We got through four films before calling it a night.

Blind Luck
On Monday I signed up to work on the blind people's modular, which is a project where we are building a wooden modular house for an association of blind individuals who use the centre as a meeting place and to make handbags and belts to sell to support themselves financially. We spent the morning collecting materials from a depot down the street from the house, with us needing three trips to collect cement bags, sand and aggregate for the roof of the centre and floor of the bathrooms. When we returned in the afternoon to pour the bathroom floor however we found that the water had shut off in the area (by my experience a pretty common problem in Pisco!) meaning we couldn't do the pour that day. On Monday night I went back to the school house with Anton et al to watch a movie. After a while spent deciding which film to watch we settled on Kick-ass, which I found a bit dissapointing! Feeling extremely tired I headed to Bedfordshire!

When Tuesday came around I was asked to return to Catherine's house to run the mixer for pouring the floor at the house. After gathering the tools and rounding up the troops we headed off. When we got there Will and Jules were just finishing off levelling the ground. After twenty minutes or so of preparing we got under way. It was a pretty straight forward day, with the exception of the mixer running out of fuel and us mixing too much concrete on the last load. After a couple of hours or so of pouring we had finished, so we had lunch that Catherine had prepared for us. In the afternoon we had to take the wood from the form boards back to a depot nearby, though this only took half an hour or so, so I had yet another afternoon free to waste! On Tuesday evening a miracle happened...... we beat the tour guides in our weekly football match!!! For the first time since I've been at PSF! Granted their best two players were on our team for some reason, but that takes nothing away from our well earned victory! After showering a bunch of us had a quick game of poker at the school house where suprise, suprise I lost!

Bringing Down the House
On Wednsday, looking for a hard day's work, I headed back to the blind people's modular, where they were planning on finishing cementing the roof of the modular and pouring concrete for the floor in the morning. In the morning I was passing buckets up from the ground to Will and Jules on the roof, who were then spreading it out and levelling it off. This was going relatively smoothly until we had nearly finished, when to our horror Will's foot crashed through one of the bamboo roof supports. On closer inspection it seemed that the bamboo had been installed wrongly and had snapped under the pressure of all the concrete (and Will!). This meant that the afternoon was spent divided between pouring the floor and fixing the roof by adding in a new bamboo support and bracing the broken support using two 2x4 planks. This was suprisingly difficult as the roof had to be lifted up and all kinds of adjustments had to be made to the bamboo pole and the wooden frame of the house to accommodate the new support. After hustling until late into the afternoon, we finally finished and had a few beers between us before heading back to HQ. I had a quick nap before dropping in for music night and after a couple of drinks I headed to bed.

Yesterday (Thursday) I decided to join the modular house project to make some of the modular panels. To start the day Joe (the project's leader), Yani and I headed over to the wood yard where we were soon joined by a new guy Jeff and two Peruvians whop had come to help out for a few days. Our first task was to move "Tarp Mountain"- a pile of black tarps that had been stored in a messy fashion outside of PSF's designated area. This meant we had to take the pretty huge tarps out one by one, fold them, then put them in an area inside our boundaries. Next on the agenda was pallette breaking, which meant taking the pallettes that I had brought from Aceros Arequipa last Wednesday and removing the wooden cross planks to be used in panel building. After a couple of hours of pretty frustrating work, we broke for lunch. We went to Diana's, a restaurant where we met up with the blind people's modular folks, who had just finished re-concreting the roof after the previous day's mishap! In the afternoon we started building panels, which involved fitting 2x4 planks into a jig, then placing twenty or so of the thin planks we had obtained in the morning and hammering them in to the form. After making the first one, we realised there were no more 2x4 planks left, so we had to stop. After dinner we went to play football, this time just PSFers v PSFers, however since there were only six of us we also roped in a few of the local kids to make up the numbers. After scoring some pretty awesome goals we called it a day at 8 o'clock. Afterwards I watched some of the girls doing "stitch and b****", their weekly knitting circle! Finally I headed over to the school house again to watch a bit of Family Guy on DVD before heading back to my room.

Today I volunteered to do site assessment, where I went with Alex and Yani around Pisco trying to find the addresses of people who have applied for our help and assess their suitability and eligibility for our help. The morning's work was fairly fruitless, with us finding the first house with relative ease, only to find that the woman was out, then spending the rest of the morning chasing a house fairly near to PSF HQ, which turned out to be lacking any financial support, meaning the house was unlikely to be worked on for at least a few more months. In the afternoon Alex, who was in charge, was called up to clean the cement mixer for an inspection by the company who lease us it, meaning Yani and I had the afternoon off, so I finally stopped procrastinating and wrote my blog!!!!

So yeah that was the last ten days for you!! Has been fun as always! I'm in the early stages of organising my inevitable trip to Macchu Picchu with Yani and his twin brother Gino. We're planning on doing a trail, meaning some trekking/mountain biking/rafting between Cusco and Aguas Caliente (the city and town nearest to Macchu Picchu) some time at the end of next week. Will do another blog before then I promise!!
Tom x