Another Cursed Ojojona House

Honduras. Day 54.

Today I led a house crew in Ojojona. Most of the group was from Chanelle , Arkansas, and I found out later that it was a memory house for someone they were close to. I had a few others from other groups join us as well. All in all, it was a big crew, but a good crew.

However, the site was not so kind.

It was about a 300 yard hike straight up rock and mud to get the wood and the tools to the site. It was simply miserable trying to get everything up there. Not to mention, it was pouring rain the entire time. We had so many people slipping and falling all day long. But eventually we divided into teams, and the wood team got everything to the site after an hour or so of hard work.

I was on the post-setting team, and I think I've never seen as many problems trying to set posts. We were on the biggest mud slope ever, so the dirt was easy to dig but almost impossible to measure level tapes on. So we had to reset the posts four or five times. It was extremely frustrating, and I could tell the group was impatient, but eventually we got them set and started putting the first boards on for all of the walls. First problem realized: the floor was going to be four feet off the ground on one of the corner posts. Very, very tough to deal with. But we pressed on through all of the problems and got three of the walls done, so then I climbed up the tall wall to chainsaw off the tops of the posts to prepare it for the 3x4. That's when everyone freaked out.

I've been doing that all summer, and so I guess I don't think about stuff being dangerous, but the group was unhappy, not because I was chainsaw while sitting on a half inch board (sorry Mom), but because the storm really picked up and lightning struck a tree about a hundred yards from our house site. It sounded like a gunshot, and the tree caught fire. All the group was like, "Russell, get down! Get down! It's not safe!" So I climbed down, and then they all wanted to go down the hill and wait on the bus for the storm to pass.

Grrr... So we did.

And as soon as we sat on the bus for a good... 30 seconds... the rain stopped. So we went back up to the house. We got a lot more done than I thought we would, but we didn't get to finish. I'll go back and finish it tomorrow morning, so I promised the family we'd come back, and apologized for not getting it done today. They understood and were appreciative. So, after a lot of obstacles, and a very tough house site, I angrily left an unfinished house.

But tomorrow... Tomorrow it will be finished.