Friday, 5:25 am - I head to the kitchen to start cooking breakfast. A satisfying (but slow cooking) breakfast of lentils with cabbage and a very fine, somewhat quinoa-like grain, I´m catching up on proteins, whole grains, and vegetables, since both the past week and the weekend to come were mostly away from home - restaurants and people´s houses - meaning rice and meat, with (maybe) an occaisional egg or salad or soup. With leaving out the meat, that´s a lot of white rice, especially since right now, with the only road to Lima washed away by flooding, vegetables are scarce and expensive.
The morning started a little earlier than the normal 6:10, but it´s not a normal day either. Rather than the usual routine of work in the chacra, I´m headed in, toward Pucallpa, to a little neighborhood called La Perla. Since Monday, I´ve been working with the crew of guys building a church for the new congregation there.
I´ve been sleeping most nights in the first elder´s son´s house, but since I´ll be heading off in the noonish peki peki for a trip upriver to visit another new church in Masisea, I headed home last night to get Sabbath clothes and leave off dirty laundry and other unecessaries. But that means leaving home early to get to work at even close to a decent hour! First, the 5 minute walk out our dirt road/long driveway to the recently paved careterra. Then, between 30 seconds and 30 minutes of walking along the road, waiting for a taxi, combi (minibus), or motokar (motorcycle modified into a 1-driver, 3-very-friendly-passengers tricycle). If a taxi comes by, it´ll be 30ish minutes to my drop off point. If a combi, 45 minutes. If it´s a motokar, 10 minutes to Campo Verde, where I can catch a taxi. When I get off the taxi, at the dirt road to Acho Mego, it´s another 10-15 minutes motokar to the church. Sum total: 45 minutes to 1 hour 40 minutes. My actual (and fairly average) time this morning: 1 hour.
The last three days of work had moved us from having twelve 4¨x5¨ posts in the ground for the two walls to having all the roof supports up, ready for nailing on the corrugated tin. (I wish I´d been more faithful in taking pictures - I´ll be working on that. I´ve gotten too lazy in using pictures from our faithful photographer, Laura. She gets lots of good ones, but she can´t be everywhere, and I´m often not where I can get them from her either.)
This morning, thankfully, the roofing sheets had been delivered on time, and the contractor had brought an extra helper, bringing the total up to 5 guys - constructor, his helper, another experienced roofer, the church elder, and me. We attacked both sides, constructor with his helper on one, roofer and elder on the other. I landed in gofer - haulding and handing up the 3ft x 10 ft. sheets to both crews, keeping them supplied with nails, etc.
By 11 am. we´d finished the first row. With only two rows plus ridgecap required, and the second row being half-size sheets, it looked impressive. But the second row is twice as hard - out of reach for getting supplies, and with the extra care of not messing up the first row by stepping on it! I´ll have to ask later how it went - by then, it was time for me to be leaving for the riverport for a weekend church visit.
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