Daniel worked with Cakito, a 17 year old Haitian boy from Pancho Mateo who was part of the original Makarios school.  They led 5 teams of boys for practices and scrimmages for 4 weeks, before having a final tournament!

Game 1 of the Quarterfinals: Montellano vs Pancho Mateo (Red vs Green).  The game started out with bright blue skies and a relatively green field.  It had been raining all week, so this was about to change.  The teams played hard, and ended up in a 3-3 tie at the end of the game, prompting a shoot out.

With more rain and more soccer playing comes… more mud.  But what is more fun than a muddy soccer game to a 10 year old boy?  The Semifinals brought Chichigua, Montellano and Pancho Mateo together in a mudfest. And the team from the Austin Stone was there to cheer them on!

The second semifinal game was put on hold when we weren’t allowed to use the goal on the field.  With only two games left for the summer, what was there to do but make new goals?  A quick trip to the Makarios house, some 2 by 4s and large screws later, and voila!  Soccer goals!

Ultimately, the Pancho Mateo boys won the day.  We had a ceremony where each kid won an award, with the top two teams receiving extra fun medals.  The boys demonstrated their summer learning by reciting their memory verses while Daniel gave a great mini-sermon on our need for Jesus.  And to end the summer… Popsicles!

A big thanks to Daniel and Cakito for all they accomplished over the summer!

After getting the kids all unloaded and ready to go, we ran to the beach!

One of the fun games the boys had was rolling in the sand to get as dirty as possible, then running and jumping into the water to rinse off.

A few of the younger kids had no desire to get in the water.  Johan tried to get Jemsy to get his feet wet, and eventually succeeded.

Darling Frid also had no desire to get wet, so we built sand mountains instead and put various “cosas” in them (her name for everything unknown… una cosa).  Jemsy helped by bringing water one spoonful at a time.

Some of the other ones built sand structures as well.

And of course, we just had fun playing in the water.

Wilton really loved the water, and rolling in the sand.

Leuri, Yasmaidi and Antony also enjoyed their time.

All in all, not a bad day’s work.  Summer camp starts again next week for the older kids!

We start of the day welcoming everyone to school. Buenos dias como estas?

After a few more songs, our closing song to prepare to pray.

And then, one of the best singers of the day gets to pray!  This is precious Junari who is in Profe Kim’s class, with some slight prompting from Antony.

Papa Dios (Father God)

Te damos gracias (We give you thanks)

Por la comida (For the food)

Por el agua (For the water)

Amen

Not bad for a 3 year old!

There are three main parties in the DR: the white party, the purple party, and the red party, with a few other people running for the green party.  The white and purple parties are enemies, and the red party is friends with everyone.

Elections around here were for Senador, Diputada (like a House Representative), Sindico (mayor), and Regidor (city council, I think).  They occur once every 4-6 years, depending on the position.  The president was elected two years ago to a four year term, so we have Leonel in for the next few years if not longer.

The main election we heard about in Montellano was for Sinidco.  Chino Rojas (purple party) vs Omar Sanchez (White party).  In the US, you might get a flyer, see a TV commercial, or get a phone call from the candidate.  Here, it’s all word of mouth.  The candidates remake popular songs to have their jingle in them, and then cars that are full of speakers drive around blasting the same song over and over and over, for weeks on end.  I think everyone in this country will probably be deaf by the age of 40 simply due to the music.   The driving by with the music started at 730 am and ended daily around 11.  The truck below is filled with speakers.

Omar Sanchez’s jingle was “Hay viene Omar, Hay viene Omar, Hay viene Omar Hay viene Omar.”  (Basically Omar is coming).  It is kinda hard to pick out the lyrics though, and for the longest time all I heard was “I give you pan.” (pan=bread)  I knew this wasn’t right, but I still have to work hard to hear the correct lyrics.  You can hear the jingle in the following video  of a parade going by our apartment.

Chino Rojas had a jingle that I believe went “Va a votar por Chino.” (Rough translation: you are going to vote for Chino.)  Or maybe it was “Va a venir con Chino” (I’m going to arrive with Chino).  And another one that just said “Chino” over and over during the song.  Chino recently paved the road into Los Ciruelos where the Makarios house is, hoping to buy votes.

We had the single cars going around blasting their music, but for the past few weeks, we have had parades.  People bust out their white shirts and flags, or purple shirts and flags, pile into whatever moving vehicle they can find and then go down the road, be it highway or through the streets of town, at about 5 mph.   My favorite parade we passed was on the way home from Sosua one day, when the purple party had probably 5 miles worth of people lined up in this parade, going frightfully slow.  We were on our moto and were thus able to scoot around the side of the parade.  You’ll also see red party cars, since they just want to get out and have fun.

However, my favorite “float” that we saw in these parades was in the white party parade last Friday.  The parade came down our street for 15 minutes, during which you cannot hear yourself think or talk over the car horns and music playing from the cars.  Toward the end came… a decorated Caterpillar front end loader, with people hanging off all over.  Awesome.  Cat, if you need a new idea to pitch for selling more heavy moving equipment, just show them this picture.

Yesterday was election day, and today was hopefully the final day of parades, celebrating Omar (white party) winning his bid for Sindico, and Francis Vargas (purple) winning for Senador. A grand total of 3,300 votes were cast in the Montellano area… I wonder what the vote to money spent ratio ended up as.  I’ve been told that it doesn’t matter who wins, no one will do anything for the community.  We’ll see.  I just would like someone to use that front end loader to knock down the big piles of rocks on the side road to the Mak house….  Chino didn’t quite finish it.

This is just a quick note that *I* think is funny, but may gross some people out.  So take care before reading on…..

After finishing all the physicals on the kids last week, my next goal as “doctora” here for Makarios was to deworm the kids.  Living in a country where the water isn’t the cleanest can bring lots of various bacteria, worms and such into our kid’s systems,which steal away the nutrients from the food each student receives daily.  Therefore, we give them medicine to hopefully kill all their worms twice a year.

Last November, the medical team brought down Pin-X and gave each student a dose.  It has been six months since then, and so we bought albendazole tablets for each of the students (Thanks Chuck!).  Yesterday, Profe Lauren’s class received the pills.  We sent home notes, so that the parents wouldn’t be surprised if their kid passed worms.  Today she overheard this conversation in her classroom.  I wish you could hear the kids talk, it would just make you laugh!

Davidson: I pooped a serpiente (snake) last night!  It was SO big. I yelled for my dad to come kill it.

Darling Frid:  I pooped a gusano (worm) too!  I yelled for my mom and I cried.  It was this big (motions about 2 feet long).

Davidson:  I didn’t cry.  My stomach hurt so bad!   (no tears for this 5 year old boy!)

Darling Frid:  I cried.  My stomach hurt too.

Two of the other students said they also passed worms, and a few others said they had stomach pain (yay for killing worms!).

One step further in the fight against malnutrition!  Now we’re just feeding the kids at school, not the worms!

(Sorry, no pictures for this one)

So let me tell you about the part the house that is finished. The two bunk rooms are now finished, painted, floors stained and bunks moved in. The large bunk room can sleep around 22 people and the small room can sleep 14. The bathrooms in each of those rooms are also completed except for small items such as toilet paper holders and towel hooks. (Note to self: purchase and install toilet paper holders and towel hooks this week.)

The upstairs hallway is completed as well with paint, stained floors and lovely light fixtures. Also completed upstairs are the two guest rooms that share a bathroom.

Downstairs the large living/dining area are finished. Green painted walls in the living area and yellow on the walls in the kitchen. A white tile back-splash has just been added above the counters. Cabinet doors and hardware have been added to complete the cabinet project that I worked on my first week in the country.

Outside, the other half of the front wall has been completed along with the large, metal automobile gate and a pedestrian gate. The wall and gates need to be painted a brighter, happier color still, but that seems like great project for a summer work group. Some of the front yard has also been filled in with eight dump truck loads of river rocks (Yes, eight!) which will help prevent the front yard from becoming a lake whenever it rains and will be the foundation for a concrete driveway in the future.

A quick story about those river rocks and how the got spread out after the trucks dumped them in piles: Chepe, Abe (pronounced: A-Bay) and I started to work on spreading one mound of rocks out with just shovels in the hot sun, but work was quite slow because moving a dump truck load of rocks is hard work. Specifically the problem was that rocks varied in size from small pebbles to rocks the size of basketballs, so when I would thrust my shovel into the rock pile, the shovel would go in about an inch and then stop because it struck a giant rock that basically had to be moved by hand. But we worked on this pile of rocks for about an hour and we put a small dent in it.

At some pointed I really started to think about how great it would be to have a bulldozer or backhoe or anything that was powered by something other than my back and arms. Not too long after those thoughts, a giant bulldozer comes up the driveway. Turns out Chepe had called for one earlier that morning, but he wasn’t sure it was going to show up or not. Well, it did show up and it leveled all four mounds of rocks that were there on that day in about 15 minutes.

The floors in the main part the house have been stained and sealed by Chris, Charlie and I. It was a project that we took on as way to save a lot of money for Makarios because we used nothing but iron-sulfate, coffee and water to stain the floors, where as store bought stain or tile would have been a hundred times more expensive. The process was a lot of trial and error of finding just the right mixture and best way of applications. But we started in areas that aren’t as seen as much and by the time we did the main room and kitchen on the first floor, we really knew what we were doing and the floors look great. After staining the floors we put a clear sealant to protect the floor and to give it an glossy look.

The exciting news now is that Makarios received funding for the remaining portion of the house which includes the last guest room and host couple quarters (a two bedroom apartment attached to the house). Construction on the remaining portion of the house should be finished in two to three weeks which is just in time for the summer and is a huge blessing. This means there will be room in the house for Chris and Erika (the Makarios host couple), the summer interns and all of the large groups coming for short term mission trips over the summer. The walls are completed and the floors have just been finished being laid.

The electrician and plumber are also working in this area. Soon we will stain the floors here and the painter will take care off the walls. And hopefully my next update on the house will come quickly and with news that it has been completed.

We live on Calle Silencio, a misnomer at best, as we are often serenaded by animals, motos and loud music throughout the day.  Our apartment is four houses down from the autopista, the main highway that runs across the north coast.  We live on the second floor of the building, above our landlord.  There are 7 other apartments in the building and a nice flat roof on top to hang out and watch the stars or hang your laundry out to dry.

As we walk down Silencio towards school, we pass Colmado Oliver.   There are multiple colmados on our street, but we tend to go mostly to Oliver since you can get most anything for day to day cooking there.  We’ve gotten everything from rice by the pound to dish soap, canned beans to fresh tomatoes and peppers.  And most importantly, it is one of the few places that sells Coca Light!  (Random side note:  The guy who owns the place is actually named Luis, but there was already a Colmado Luis on Silencio, so he named it after his son, Oliver.)

As we keep walking towards school, we have to turn onto main street for a bit.  Main Street runs the length of town parallel to the main highway for about a mile, with lots of small shops, restaurants, ferreterias and small parks along the way.  I get my fresh veggies at a stand less than 5 minutes walk from my apartment.  At the corner of Main Street and Silencio is the restaurant Garage (ga-RAH-he) where we can get our daily plato del dia for lunch, consisting of rice, beans and chicken, all for the bargain price of 100 pesos.  Across the street from Garage is our church, Iglesia Templo Biblico, along with a Compassion International school and a private Christian school Adonai in the same area.

Not far down Main Street, we turn right into the neighborhood of Tamarindo, where many of our kids live.  In the morning, one often sees the woman of the house sweeping or mopping the house, and watering the road (I have yet to understand the reason to wet down the road).  Watch your step as you walk down the street, as you never know what was there last.

Tamarindo is a maze of houses separated by alleyways approximately 8 feet wide separating the rows of houses.  I still get quite lost in most of it, but I have learned the way to some of our kid’s houses.  Many of the houses are approximately 15×20 feet and house multiple generations of family members.

At the end of the street, before getting  to the river, we turn left down a small dirt pathway to get to the school.  Every morning as we walk up we are greeted by students running to give hugs, so glad that we are there to love on them.  And that is what makes this all worthwhile!

Welcome to Montellano!

-Andy

Sorry about the long period between post. I promise the lack of new material here isn’t because nothing is going on. In fact, just the opposite, so much is going on that it is hard to find the time and energy to create a new post. But enough whining. Here’s what I have for you:

I am long overdue for a construction update on the new Makarios House and I will post up a detailed description of what the progress has been very soon. But to hold you over I wanted to show you how the “mezcla”, or plaster mixture, is made before it goes on the walls to give the house a smooth finished look.

For the last two weeks I have been working hands-on with the construction team learning how they work here (hard and for a long time) and helping out with the simple stuff like carrying the mezcla in buckets to the skilled guys who put it on the walls. Like these workers who are plastering the walls:

But the mezcla doesn’t just appear out of no where. Nope. It’s made by hand and a lot of sweat, just like everything else here. And I can now say that I have experience making the stuff. So without further ado here’s a picture tutorial:

Step 1: Sift the sand

Step 2: spread the sifted sand on the ground

Step 3: Add cement mix in the correct ratio

Step 4: Spread the cement out on top of the sand

Step 5: Shovel the sand and cement into a pile

Step 6: Admire your pile

Step 7: Knock down the pile of the mixture

Step 8: Spread out the mixture

Step 9: Create a well in the middle of the mixture

Step 10: Fill it with water

Step 11: Put the walls of the "pool" into the water.

Step 12: Keep mixing with shovel

Step 13: Make another pile

Step 14: Knock the pile down

Step 15: Add water as needed

Step 16: Continue mixing

Step 17: Transport the "mezcla" (mixture) in buckets

The whole process takes about 25 minutes to make a batch and seems pretty simple, just a lot of shovel work, but the magic is that these guys know just how much sand, cement and water to add to the mix to make it just right so it all sticks to the walls. Also, you may notice from the pictures that every shovel in this country is about half as long as it needs to be. This leads to a lot of bending over (especially if you are like me and are a foot taller than Mingo, in the white ball cap) and to having a sore back by the end of the day.

So there you have it. Now you too can make your own plaster.

Hunter Dryden has started the task to determine the greatest modern musician on his blog here. His first and second posts describe the blog’s basis and how the rating system works and the rest is a fun read.  I trust Hunter’s opinion on most things because he’s one of the smartest people I know (despite going to A&M) and I especially respect his opinion on music matters because  he is a great musician himself.

In fact, Hunter is in the band called Paul Banks and The Carousels and Hunter wrote a very insightful article posted on the bands website here.

Besides me having a “man-crush” on Hunter, this all ties back into Makarios because Paul Banks and The Carousels played at the MakArt fund raiser for Makarios yesterday as noted on the Makarios blog. (Sorry, I wanted to post this blog before the show, but we still don’t have internet at our place.)So there it is, a free plug for my friend and his band.

-Andy

Ps, I realize that’s a lot different blogs I linked to, so if you are like me and have many blogs to keep up with, you may want to try Google’s Reader. It saves me time for the small amount of  time we do have internet. (Google owes me a kick back for that,)