Hallo there!! Has been another busy week (although my passion for staying up late drinking has somewhat dwindled!). I'm reaching the end of my long stay in Peru, with the prospect of returning to the real world looming in just two weeks!! Anyway this is whatI've been up to in the last week and a bit:

On Saturday I returned for another half day working at Guillermo's house, continuing the week's work of jackhammering away at the foundations to make way for new foundations that we will be starting soon. After a few hours of hard work we called it a day and had lunch with the family. I spent the afternoon relaxing at the school house, playing some darts and ping-pong before I headed over to the main house to join in with some of the Saturday night festivities! Later on we headed out to our regular drinking-hole the Afro-Cafe before I headed to bed.

On Sunday I woke pretty late and headed to get breakfast from the local bakery. After I finished I headed with a few others down to the beach, which turned into a trip to Paracas (about a 25 minute drive away), so I instead went for a quick walk down the beach with Gringo, the house dog. I checked out the skate ramp that had been built by a PSF volunteer a few weeks ago, which had sadly already been broken in several places!! Afterwards I headed back to the school house to chill out for the rest of the day.

Cementing Our Reputation
Before the Monday morning meeting I was asked to run the mixer on Luis' house, a project that had been going on for a week that needed its foundations filling with concrete. I was pretty eager to do this as I hadn't been on a concrete pour for a few weeks now. The surrounding area of the site was pretty weird, with a homeless guy living in a nearby truck trailer, a couple of pigs roaming the adjacent field near us and another couple of pig pens upwind from us that made the area stink! The cement mixer we were using was hired and was also brand new, so after getting acquainted with it and figuring out how it worked, I showed everyone how to work it and got it started. The first few hours were a little stop and start, as the metal columns needed installing as well as a trench caving in at one point. At about 12.30pm we stopped for lunch, which a couple of local women provided for us. After lunch we had to move a massive piles of rocks to the sides of the trench to be added to the mix. With a couple of hours left in the day we finally got stuck into some proper concrete pouring and by the end of the day about a third of the required concrete was poured. Monday night was a pretty quiet night so I headed back to my room to watch some TV.
We returned to Luis' house on Tuesday and got stuck into some more hard labour. The morning's work went a lot more smoothly and we managed to get a load of work done. Some wooden form boards had to be brought in as some of the trenches were too wide, which made our job a little easier. In the afternoon we kept the good pace up and we were pretty dissapointed when we had to stop about an hour or so from completing the foundations. In the evening we had our weekly football game against the tour guides, which after a string of wins, we finally lost. After showering and watching some TV I went to bed.

The Furious Man Beast: Origins
On Wednesday I was put in charge of another Aceros Arequipa visit, which started a week long period of me working in the woodyard. We went down there with the brief to bring back a load of two metre long 4x4 beams of wood, as we hadn't received any in a couple of months, and they are critical to the production of our modular houses. As usual, after meeting with Leeward, our contact at AA, it became aparent that we were unlikely to ever receive any more big 4x4s, so we sorted out a load of palettes as well as some long thin planks and some tarps and headed back to the PSF woodyard. After unloading the wood and putting it away, I explained the situation to Biba and Shannon, the project managers and we decided it was time to unroll our "plan B", which was to join together our one metre 4x4s and use them instead. On the evening we had a game of poker, which after a few ups and downs I managed to win, pocketing myself a handsome 25 soles (about six quid!).

The following day I set about the mammoth task of sorting out the wood yard (named on the board as "The Furious Man Beast Project"!). This involved sorting the wood into piles of good, square 1 metre 4x4s to be used in the modular homes project, shorter or broken 4x4s that could be used for making furniture and rubbish wood to be given away. After a morning dismantling the massive wood piles we went for lunch at Diana's, a local restaurant, before returning in the afternoon to re-stack them into thier respective piles. After an exhausting day we called it quits and I headed back to the house. Thursday football was postponed due to a meeting taking place, so I spent the night at the main house, sat by the fire having a few drinks, just like the good ol' days!!

Don't Rain on My Parade
Friday morning was supposed to be spent continuing the Furious Man Beast Project, however due to lack of numbers, I spent the morning doing the "environment day parade" which was an event organised by the municipality to raise awareness about environmental issues. We turned up at 10am (when it was supposed to start) to find noone there. However a couple of environment people soon showed up along with some schools. The local police were also part of our parade, so one of the volunteers, Mike ended up in a big policeman's suit (kind of children's entertainer-style, if you know what I mean) and spent the parade on the back of a police car waving at kids! We were given refuse bags to give to the onlooking masses with the message "don't throw rubbish in the streets" which I had to teach to the volunteers in Spanish! The actual parade lasted about twenty minutes, at the end of which we were treated to a puppet show, extolling the virtues of putiing rubbish in bins and keeping Paracas beach clean! Afterwards we headed back home and I got started on sorting out some more of the woodyard, this time focussed on the big messy pile of wood which contained a mix of 2x4s (perfect for building modular panels with), planks of wood and random bits of wood suitable for making furniture with. By the end of the day we had sorted the wood into messy piles, which we left for the following day. On the evening I watched another DVD in my room.

Today, Saturday I returned to the wood yard to stack the sorted wood into neat piles. This only took a couple of hours and after giving the yard a general tidy I headed to the gas station to watch the Arsenal vs Sunderland football match before coming to write my blog!!

So that's my blog, only a couple more left before I return back to old Blighty!! I'm starting to get the taste for some good English Fish and Chips, so although I'll be sad to leave I'm also really excited to get back to the real world!!

Tom x