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Hello, welcome to part ten of my blog about my fun times in Pisco, Peru. It has been another crazy week so far, been up to my eyeballs in work and fun stuff!!
Demolition Man
On Tuesday I decided to help out on a demolition project at Lidia's house in San Andres. This involved taking a jack-hammer and two slegde hammers in order to knock two walls down and dig out the foundations of the house. For the first half hour we took turns demolishing a small wall with the sledge hammer before the maestro arrive at about 10 o'clock. For the rest of the day the maestro knocked down the big wall while we excavated the foundations of another wall with the jack-hammer. This was pretty intense work, but after two more hours work we broke for lunch. In the afternoon we finished off the foundations of the first wall before starting work on the other wall, which had by then been demolished. We called it a day at 4.30 at which point we headed back to the house. After dinner we had our weekly football game against the tour guides. After six straight defeats since I started at PSF, we finally didn't lose a game!!! We didn't win either but we were content with our 4-4 draw! Feeling tired after a hard day's work and a gruesome game of football I went to bed shortly after.
Still feeling a little sore from the previous day, I volunteered to make metal columns with Anton at Jhean Carlos' house on Wednesday. However, when we arrived there it was apparent that the trenches which were supposed to be finished were nowhere near completed and we would need most of the day finishing them. So cue another back breaking day of labour shovelling dirt! The trenches were more or less finished by 3pm, which gave us an hour and a half to start making columns. We managed to get two done, with the understanding that the maestro was going to make some more after we left and would be up early the next morning to finish them so we could start pouring cement. In the evening we had music night again, so we had a bit of a sing-song by the fire, before heading to bed.
All Maestros are Liars!!
So when we returned to Jhean Carlos' house on Thursday morning it was apparent that 1) the maestro hadn't stayed late to do more columns and 2) He hadn't got up early to start work on some more. So when we turned up at 9am, cement mixer in tow, we were forced to take the mixer back and resign ourselves to a whole day of making metal columns. At about 1pm we were not far from completing the columns, so we toyed with the idea of starting the cement pour in the afternoon with two mixers, but our idea was shot down by Thays, the project manager, who said it could not be done. After wrapping it up at Jhean Carlos' house, I had the rest of the day free, so I took a trip to the market where I bought some clothes and a watch. When I got back a group of us organised a game of football, this time just a bunch of us PSFers. After showering I spent the rest of the night by the fire talking to my new Irish room-mate Conor, who was telling me about his life travelling around the world setting up bars and clubs as well as living on an Israeli Kibutz commune!
If It's Not One Thing Its Another
On Friday Morning a few of us set off at 8am to start prepping for the big cement pour. Againt the maestro was supposed to have started early but once again had not, so we had about an hour or so of setting up the metal columns in the trenches before we could finally get started with the cement pour. The pour went smoothly at first with us managing to do two solid hours of work before the water ran out. We had a 15 minute break whilst the water refilled before starting up again until disaster struck and all the water in Pisco cut out. This meant we were unable to do any more pouring, so we had to stop and figure out a plan. The truck was unavailable, which thwarted my plan to ferry water from our house's water tank, so we were forced to use water from a kind of septic tank in a nearby house. After another half an hour or so that water ran out, so we formulated a plan to ferry water from the house by hand using buckets and wheelbarrows, which was a bit of a nightmare given the bumpy nature of the roads in Pisco, but we managed to salvage enough water to keep us going another hour, at which point, still pretty far from finishing, we decided to call it a day.
Going Once, Going Twice...
On the night we had a 'silent auction' which involved bidding on a number of items that were displayed on tables by writing your name on paper next to the items. I donated a few items, including my Aceros Arequipa t-shirt (which I had two of) which was put in the non-silent auction at the end of the night. I bought a number of items, including a blanket, a water bottle, some nice playing cards, some work gloves and in the non-silent auction I won a night in Simon's room, which is equipt with a DVD player, hundreds of DVDs and a Playstation. I paid 50 soles (about £12) for these, which paled into insignificance when compared to the 6144 soles we raised in total, with the biggest selling item being a tattoo of the winner's choices on the side of a girl's head, which went for a staggering 2600 soles, more than enough to buy a modular house for a family.
On Saturday, with Anton away for a few days, I pawned off Maria's house (which was due to resume then) on Sarah and took charge of the rest of the concrete pour at Jhean Carlos' house. I recruited another crew together to head off early for another long day of cement pouring. We started well, managing two hours or so of solid work befor things inevitably started going wrong. The water had cut out again meaning we had another half an hour of collecting water from the sewage well, before starting up again, only to run out of materials half an hour's work away from finishing. This means that a pour that, for structural integrity reasons should have been done in one day will now be done over the space of four days. In the evening a group of people left for Huacachina, however feeling tired from my weeks work, I stayed behind. I went with Liz to the market to get some breakfast for Sunday morning, before settling in for a night of music, poker and Pisco Sours by the fire.
And that concludes another exhaustingly fun week at Pisco Sin Fronteras! Will try and get back to doing two blogs a week next week but I'm really sruggling to find a spare hour!! Please feel free to put a message on my message board, not entirely sure anyone's actually reading this any more!! Ciao for now!!
Tom x
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