Knocking Down a Wall

Hello my name is William Ruppert. Today my team, workgroup four, went to the Evangelical Methodist Church Jesus Cristo De Buenos Aires. Our main project was filling in an entire slab of concrete so the church would be less vulnerable to flooding. We filled in about a twenty-foot by eight-foot slab of concrete about two inches high. To maximize our work output we had eight people filling up buckets of rocks and sand and four people moving the concrete with wheel barrels and in turn dumping the concrete to make the slab. After the concrete was dumped there were two more people smoothing it out so that there was a nice smooth surface. This project took us about four hours and as a sort of reward we got to tear down a wall. I was lucky enough to be able to man the sledgehammer and go at the wall. At first we were sort of clueless and just attacked the wall top to bottom. We quickly learned that this was a lot more tiring than going from bottom to top. My friend Tripp Russ and I got on a roll and tag teamed the wall fairly quickly to its fall. This work was very tiring and at the end I was drenched in sweat and had acquired a very manly musk. After work we went to a phenomenally prepared lunch by a few local women. The lunch consisted of rice with chicken, beans, outstanding pico de gallo, rice pudding, mango, and pineapple. The fruit here is delicious and always the ripest and freshest fruit I have ever eaten. For sort of a dessert we had Chickys, which are these almost vanilla wafers with a strawberry frosting on one side. These have quickly become my new favorite candy. After lunch we went to a different church a few miles away from Puerto Viejo where we participated in a Vacation Bible School. We sang, danced, and drew pictures for about thirty minutes, and then the real fun began. After we had finished the required work we played soccer with the kids and it was a blast. Unfortunately our game ended early because both of our soccer balls got kicked into the river by the field. After an exhausting, but fun day of work, we came back to the hotel to another wonderful meal. We had chicken, pasta, rice, and strawberry mango lemonade for our drink. After dinner we got some free time before worship where we sang, heard a testimony, and Wes Cole had a “text message interceptor” where he read out “intercepted” text messages. When worship came to a close we went to our small groups and in my small group we all shared a good, bad, and ugly part of the day. Today has been exhausting, but very rewarding and is definitely an experience of a lifetime.