Digging Deep (Day Four)

I want to start by saying thank you once again for all your prayers for me and the rest of the group. I am feeling much better and today I returned to the work site. We all put our work clothes on complete with gloves and bandanas to cover our faces. As we walked to the work site, everybody felt sore and more tired than the previous days. A long day of hard work was certainly ahead of us. Chandler started the group off with the first shoveling of dirt. The process of making concrete has been ingrained in our heads by this point. First, fill up two wheel barrels with dirt. Second, fill up one wheel barrel with rocks. Then, pour all three wheel barrels into the huge tub where a bag of cement rests. The bag is broken open and the real work begins. Six or seven people grab shovels or hoes and mix the batch of concrete for twenty to thirty minutes while buckets of water are added sporadically throughout the process. Once our first batch of the day was completed, we shoveled the freshly made concrete into a wheel barrel and dumped it onto the portion of the floor we had not completed. Mrs. Wier and another worker spread the concrete evenly throughout the floor. After we produced enough concrete to finish the floor in the house, we began to mix more so that the workers could fill the columns in the walls that support the house. Once a batch was completed, we formed an assembly line. At the beginning of the line, two people shoveled concrete into buckets. The buckets were then passed from person to person in the line until they reached the worker on the ladder who would pour out the bucket into the empty gaps in the walls which would become concrete columns. After the batch was all used up, we went back to making more batches. It seemed like the mixing would never end. Our Nica crew was split up into various groups so that one faction would mix in order to give the other faction some amount of rest. The work for today eventually came to an end. Tonight we will gather as a group once again and share a devotion. It's awesome to see this team grow together. We have become more than just an eclectic group of high school students, we have already started to become a close knit group of friends. Day four was a day that was hard to find motivation to work. All of us were pretty wiped and the sun beating down on us made us want to give up. Today we truly had to dig deep. Dig deep into our hearts, minds, and spirits to muster up the strength to continue to work hard. Homesickness is kicking in and real sickness has a couple of us feeling more fatigued than usual but we press on towards the goal which is to change this family's life through love. The finish line for the house is in sight; we just have to dig a little deeper.

~Michael Alexander Martinez