Hábitat para la Humanidad

On Sunday, a small group of us joined the Cochabamba chapter of Habitat for Humanity to work on some houses. They actually had eight houses that they are working on and there were between 7 and 10 of us working on each house. Having done Habitat in college I thought I had some idea of what would be going on. Nope. Our task for the day was moving bricks up a hill, well over 1000 bricks in fact. It felt frusturating to see the other groups moving on flat ground, but good to use muscles that have been dorment for the last two months. You might recall the infamous Tarata trip and a little detail about how I forgot my memory card. Well history does repeat itself. These pictures were donated by Ginny. You can't see the site where we were working from this picture.

With seven people the work went very slowly and our assembly line was ineffective because there was a lot of walking; not enough people to fill in the gaps so that everybody could just stand and pass. The woman whose house we were building was living in a little shack behind the new site. At the break she made us all very delicious egg, tomato, and mayo sandwiches. That brightened our spirits. In the fifth hour, as the day was beginning to draw to a close and our stack was only 2/3rds moved, a group of six men and three women happened upon us and sprung into action. It reminded me of the Amish community getting together to raise a barn. The men were throwing bricks to each other up the hill and we got the pile finished in less than an hour. We wanted to take a picture and asked the women if it would be alright if they were in the picture. Also similiar to the Amish, they don't generally like getting their picture taken. They didn't give us the impression that they minded so these two pictures resulted from that exchange.

Our experience at the language school has been fairly benign. The school is surrounded by high walls and beautiful gardens within it's interiors and we all generally live with the middle to upper middle class. My day with the people at Habitat was exactly what I needed to feel like I was accomplishing something good in Bolivia. It was very powerful to be flanked on either side by these beautiful indigenous women that were helping simply because someone needed help. During one of our rests I shared my water bottle with one of the women and it was truely a liminal moment. Like I said, the event was on a Sunday and I experienced more of the true meaning of "church" on that mountain side then I would have within the confines of a building.