Mar
The playground we’re constructing at the Fabretto Children’s Foundation school here in Cusmapa is coming together nicely. We are on schedule and plan to finish the tree fort, the spinning wheel, the tire swing, the other swing set, the hideout hut, the balance beam and the musical drums today…if you can believe it. We have faith. It will be done. It is good.
Christina checks her calculations as she helps install tree fort support beams.
The Roadmonkey crew is basically 10 people, including me and my co-leader, Juan Flores of San Diego (aka Juan Pablo Escobar because of the cheesy drug-kingpin shades he bought from a vendor down in San Juan del Sur). Juan, I and Stephanie (aka Estefani) have been the swingset-install team; Deborah J., Kim, Zaby aka Raby, and Carolee have been roaming from the musical drums to the spinning disk; meanwhile, over on the tree fort, Christina, Emily and Deborah R. have been hammering, measuring and drilling their way toward a structure that integrates two large trees into the heart of the fort. The students here are already in love with it.
Drill, baby, drill...
These students have put a lot of work into this playground, which was designed from our construction partners here, a PBS crew from Boston that is filming the building process for an upcoming program. In the process of our cooperative work with the students, we’ve started to get to know them ever so slightly, through bashfulness and initial reticence, to the point where they’ve taken a liking to a few Roadmonkeys in particular.
Roadmonkey Stephanie, aka Estefani, is a princess in the eyes of these girls.
The women on our crew are the natural magnets to the Fabretto students, whether girls or boys, making eye contact and trading questions with them and posing for photos much more easily than with the gringo men.
Amigas por la vida. (Friends for life.)
Each of our first two work days have been long: we rise at 6am, eat as much breakfast as we can, knowing lunch is five hours and a hot sunny morning away, and then break for an hour lunch at noon. Then we’re back to work by 1pm, working through the afternoon heat and dust, into dusk and then darkness. We’ve been wrapping up around 6:45pm, working by fluorescent light bulb when necessary, to ensure we stay on schedule.
The remains of the work day.
After our 12-hour workdays, we shower and eat an excellent dinner, prepared by the Fabretto house manager and cook, Nora. That’s usually followed by a round, or three, or more, of Toña beer, the group’s preferred Nica brew. I think we and the PBS people have plowed through about 70, beers after quittin’ time since Wednesday night.
All well deserved, mind you.
- Paul
