gettin' dirty

On Tuesday, we got to work on this really cool project. All the people in the YD group went over to the house of a Santa Lucian family and we built a trail and two stools for them in a few hours. How did this happen? Well the family asked for help from us and our trainers decided it would be a great project for us. We used only local resources-tires that the family had, cement, rocks, and 20 oz. pop bottles filled with sand. The house was at the top of a hill and she wanted a trail to the toop of the hill. So we dug into the hill, placed tires (that served as stairs) into the holes, filled the tires with rocks and dirt (for stability) and made a trail of 9 stairs. The stools: we placed a rod into the ground and used the pop bottles as a base and covevered them with concrete and made layers that way. The bottoms of the pop bottles would stick out at the edge, so that the family could paint them as decorations-like flowers, I guess. It was had work but also really interesting to watch it come together. My hands were covered in dirt, then sand, then conrete and my pants were filthy but it feel great to accomplish something. We were told that we could do activities like these two with the youth in our communities as a waste management lesson. We are also going to learn how to make wallets/purses out of chip bags (imagine 25 cent Doritos bags), which is a really popular trend in Honduras right now. I was reading the paper last Sunday and there was a huge article on it and it looked really interesting. Maybe when I'm back in Chicago, you'll see me picking through the trash to find chip bags to make purses!