7.4.

Part 1

This day started without our alarm clock Pete - too bad. I found it quite hard to peal myself out of the cozy sleeping bag and get ready for work, especially hard as a moscito decided to to leave a bite on my left eye lid and even harder as the previous two days (Sunday and Monday) were very relaxing and sleepy. But finally I made it down to the food area and found the magical liquid coffee.

As a starter we played the game "HaSuKo!" which helped people to actually wake up... A big work area for today was the stone wall that will be built in the coming days. As I´ve been working with the big stone wall last year during another workcamp, I decided to work with the new wall for today. It´s like making a puzzle, just that the pieces weigh up to maybe 10 kg or more... In the morning we already used three 50 kg cement bags. The work went really quick and good. It was so nice to just work and not think of anything that needs to be organized or the book keeping... And suddenly I heard the shout "almoco!" (lunch) meaning the regular solid base of rice and beans and today some chicken meat and punpkin. Gostoso! 

Part 2

Uff! What a day! The second half also rushed by and now it´s almost supper time.

After lunch break I met with the other organizers of the workcamp to look at the two coming weeks. Those meetings usually eat up quite a lot of time and sometimes I find myself sitting there with "itchy" fingers that want to go outside and do some physical work. Today was a long meeting woth lots of discussion points, announcements that need to be made etc. My head almost stopped working at some point and my potuguese came out in a weird mixture of english and german...

Then I had my daily session of book keeping. When I left the office at maybe 15:30 I couldn´t belief what I saw: The stone wall was almost finished! People worked like ants! Some were constantly mixing new cement, others filled the wheelbarrows with "massa", some picking out the right, fitting stones, the strong ones carried them to the wall and others filled all the cracks and holes with cement and - not to forget - very important, a crew of people cleaned every single stone.

At some point we all thought it would start to rain and sped up the place - I counted 13 people working like crazy! I still don´t belief but the wall was finally finished in one day of fantic work. It´s quite amazing to see how much you can reach, if a lot of hands work together for one aim. Sounds cheesy but its true.

The plans fot the evening are: food, swiss chocolate, a nicely rolled american spirit cigarette, Tati is just making pasteis (Brazilian "speciality"), later we will have a meeting with the entire group and then watch a movie together - by then I´ll be probably asleep.

Christina Gerodetti

PS: The daily soccer game between the Brazilians and the Gringos ended with 1:0 for the Brazilians...