Long day on the Finca!

Thank you to everyone for all your support and well wishes!

Today I had the opportunity to work on a finca! Also known as a farm. We left the house around 6:45 to catch our public mode of transportation: a chicken bus. Why they are called that I have no idea... Actually I do. They have bald tires, they squish about 4 people in a 2 person seat, they blast what ever kind of music, people board from the front and the back "exit door", they hall ass down side roads and their brakes well, you just hope they work. Our bus ride cost about 25 whole cents and we rode it for about 15 minutes. The town we got off was called Ciudad Vieja. We had about a 5 minute walk to pick up tools at a place called As Green As it Gets. I met a man named Pedro who was my jefe (boss) for the day. He is about 2 feet shorter than me and can carry twice as much as me. I carried a pick ax and two cement buckets (not with cement) and we headed to the finca. The town we were in was situated at the base of the volcano "Agua" and the finca was on the side of Agua. It felt like we walked forever... FOREVER... It was literally about a 15 minute walk to the finca and it felt like an hour. Our first job was to fill up the cement buckets with rocks and sand. We filled about 5 buckets with rocks and carried them down to a small creek (sin=without water) and then we carried 6 buckets of sand to the same place. The plan was to mix the rocks, sand and some cement mix to make a mixture. After those 11 buckets we had to fetch water. I had to walk up a hill to a tilapia pond with the most fowl smelling water I have ever smelled. Apparently tilapia feed on algae so the water was green and nasty. Walking back down to the creek I had to stop multiple times to switch arms to avoid spilling water on myself. The plan for the day was to build a retaining wall in part of the creek so when the rains come the water is retained and then the sediment from the rain will fill up part of the creek to make a natural bridge across the creek for motorbikes to access. Before I had got there someone had dug a trench  for us to fill with BOULDERS and cement. I started in the ditch and would pour some cement then place a boulder and pour more cement. This process was repeated for about 2 hours. When I say boulder I mean boulder. They were at least 30+ pound rocks we were using. My rock duty ended and I got to mix cement. Not much easier than lifting rocks. Mind you we were mixing with a shovel not an electric mixer. Joyous. We got to the finca at 7:30 and after all I just described it was only 9 am! Are you kidding me. Only 9am... But we did get about half of the retaining wall built and thank the heavens we ran out of cement. So we did some weeding in the farm area and had lunch in a tree! It was great but my body is in pain. I forgot what exertion was! Geez more signs of obesity ha. That was my day in  nutshell! More stories to come after I go to the black sand beaches tomorrow.

Also good news about Rulfino, my friend Lisa helped me contact a local health organization and one of the doctors have agreed to come out and check Rulfino out!!! More to come next week!