One of the things that we have learned here this week is the necessity of talking and not letting your feelings stay bottled up inside. Take the parging / wall finishing for instance. There are several stages involved with properly finishing the brick walls. The first is a rough bottom coat to fill in the gaps & uneveness of the hand made bricks used. Then, one of the brick layers from the community runs a piece of square tubing over the wall to smooth out the rough edges and show the spots that need to be filled in. This needs to be done before the wall covering dries & hardens too much to work. The other day, we as a team were going like gangbusters, applying the rough bottom coat on 4 walls, while no one started to smoothing process. We simply got to far ahead. This ended up taking longer in the end, because of the extra work involved with finishing a hardened surface.
This caused some tension in our dealings with the workers and we weren't quite sure why at the time. Nehemiah, our guide & translator and general fixit guy, spoke with the workers, and in our "End Of The Day Meeting" brought things out into the open. The end result for today, was we got a lot more work done, and we were having a lot more fun doing it.
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