la casa de amor en mexico...

Here is what the house looked like on the day we arrived. Becuase we were all so excited to get going, we went to work the first day we could and ended up working seven straight days hoping to get as much as possible completed. As you can see.... no hammers and nails in our future!

It turns out that the entire family is living in the two room house on this property, with a newly added bathroom (of sorts). The house we were building for Rosalva and her kids is basically in the backyard.
So, while I did not improve on my framing skills, I can now mix cement like the best of them! There really is a technique and an art to mixing a good batch of cement...

This pile of innocent looking cement blocks is a portion of the 2000 blocks we moved from the front of the house through the house to the back, in portions, and with a lovely chain gang approach. Yes, there was some singing during this part...
Once we got there, it was clear that eleven of us plus the two brick masons (maestros) were too many to work on the house at once. Several team members took notice of the steps from the door of the house and how dangerous and worn they were, especially for the older Magdalena and Simon. So... our industrious group decided new steps were in order! Simon (Rosalva's father) is sitting in the chair watching over things as he did whenever he wasn't working along side us. When Rosalva came home one day and saw that new steps had been started, she cried and thanked us.

Here is Roslava taking a break during a hard day, and Ben and Martha working on the walls to the bathroom. They don't have running water, so the bathroom will be a toilet that you pour water into after use and it runs out into a sewage pipe. That is what you see Rex digging.

I don't have pictures of them, but many of Rosalva's siblings and other family helped us every day. People would come over and jump right in.... it was great fun!