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