Jamesly's Blog Post

Junior Journey so far has been a great experience. For a week we have been helping a community fix around their church in Hermano Pedro. The work was hard but the result was breath taking. During these days a few Junior Journey students and I went to San Pedro and helpedconstruct a home that was burned down. I felt sad about the situation and wanted to help. Walking to the burnt area and seeing what was left to the home was horrible. But what struck me the most was that the family wasn’t showing a hint of sadness. We helped take out the ash from the area where we would help rebuild the home. We worked for a few hours and when it was time to leave, the family members were sad.The next day we helped with the construction of the home where we dug a hole in the ground to put huge logs in. Those logs were the foundations of the home. It was a difficult challenge. After helping out, we went home feeling satisfied. I can’t imagine how long it would take them to construct the home. At the end of the day I felt pleased to help a family in need.

Liliana's Blog Post

I’m a part of the ConstruCasa group so this blog post is going to be about that. For ConstruCasa we are building a community center in a village near San Pedro where the others are teaching called San Gasper. The community center is mainly for kids from the surrounding community after school to help them with their school work like math and writing as well as teaching them extra life skills like cooking. The building they had before was too small so we’re helping to build a new one for them.

A lot of the walls of the downstairs are done so most of the actual building is going on upstairs. At this point most of the building is made of cement and concrete, but there are some pillars that are partially made of wood and other materials will be added on later. One of these materials will cover the ceilings of the rooms. However to attach this, the ceiling needs to be rough and one of the days last week that was out job. There was a sort of platform build in one of the rooms and we stood on it and had small axes to hit the ceiling with. It was dark and dirty work because we were in one of the back rooms and there’s no electricity yet so we couldn’t see well and when we hit the concrete small pieces flew off. If you weren’t careful you could hit yourself or someone else in the face or eye and you often ending up covered in dust and small chips of concrete.

It was really hard work and tiring but it was cool to here that the masons said that we did an important job really well. I have a lot of respect for the masons because they work at the site all day doing harder jobs in the hot sun, because there isn’t a roof on the building yet, and they don’t use the power tools that you see and hear at the construction sites back in the US. 

Liliana Beckman