Crack On!

Please keep in mind that the computer I am using has a ,foreign, keyboard - the dashes and shifts and apostrophe keys are NOT in the RIGHT places! And the computer is one of 2 here, our hours are limited to after hours, and there are 16 trying to use them. Thus my punctuation may not be perfect!

Here is a typical day: wake up around 6:45 and make coffee. I was warned that they only drink nescafe instant down here, so I brought a pound of Martha´s coffee, filters, and a little plastic drip thing. I make my 2 cups and leave the device for the next comrade - we agreed that since I brought the apparatus I could have the clean filter of the day.... then it turns into a free for all sludge fest for the late wakers. We did find ground coffee in the store, but no filters. As a precaution I had begun to wean myself down to one big cup each morning, fearing that I would be paralyzed with a caffeine deprivation migraine! Then we sit in the common room, like a common room of a college dorm, while people get up and ready, and we do stretches to get our aching bodies moving again. At 8 am we eat downstairs and leave at 8:45 on a micro (bus) for a 25 minute drive out of town to the site. We pass by various housing styles, some very nice, some are rows of small wood and cinder block houses. Some have rusted corrugated tin roofs with crap outside a failing weathered fence. All kinds. At the site we get crackin with cement mixing to pour foundations, hauling sand, rock and gravel, as well as moving wood for the crews making wall frames and roof trusses. Today we poured the last foundation, and erected the first set of walls. After so much work on foundations and prep it was amazing to see walls form a room. Sometimes the ladies of the families come out with sopapillas and pebre - this awesome salsa like concoction that I cannot leave Chile without...I love it! We work til 1 when we all cram into this one house that has been taken over as our base, where Anita feeds us these amazing meals. She was hired to cater our lunches by Habitat, and sometimes she cooks onsite and sometimes brings it in. One day it was fried salmon, one was a chicken leg body thing with amazing rice, or cosuella (spelling be damed) a typical potato meat broth stewy thing, very tasty. Each meal has a salad and desert. I expected to be on the Habitat diet and lose 10 pounds, but I think I am actually gaining weight. The only meal I didn´t dig too much was a stewy thing but the meat hunk had a unique flavor and the meat surrounded a triangular bone of unknown origin and I could pick it up and see through the middle...sorry but...creepy. Overall much more than expected and tasty.

At the Hogar the food is pretty good and similar in variety. One of the older girls is our server. They are very nice here and Jaime, the manager, has gone out of his way for us.

Since we went to the Villarica bed and breakfast this weekend, then Monday night went to pizza and vino, we have been enjoying some variety. The man who runs the local store where we go in packs after work, covered in cement and dirt, to drink beers in 16 oz cans out front near the sewer pipe, he misses us when we don´t show up and we warn him when we know we have other plans. Here a week and already a local hangout, though we are not used to standing outside a corner store with big cans of beer wearing day laborer clothing, eyes peeled for the military styled police on dirt bikes to cruise by- our code phrase is "GREEN LADY DOWN!" referring to our green beer cans of Cristal.