After breakfast, I took a couple of pictures of our lodging. The top picture is a typical bamboo lodge that we are all staying in. They are made of bamboo with a thatched roof. They have a toilet and a shower. The floors are made of woven material and in mine, I can see daylight through the weaving.
There is a restaurant where we eat breakfast and dinner. It is open air--there are no walls or doors. My lodge is up on stilts so the front is 10+ feet off the ground. It is a unique place to stay in my experience. I'll post some pictures of the interior in a later post.
We worked for a couple of hours after breakfast. Our task was to dig trenches to lay plumbing for toilets, showers, and sinks before we pour the floor next week. This is hard work.
The soil is clay, and the further down you go, the wetter it gets. And, we had to go a couple of feet deep to be able to run the pipe below the footers. The deeper the trench got, the harder it got to pull the dirt out. The deepest trench had to be about 60 feet long. That is a lot of dirt to move. The trench that Roger is working on will provide water and drainage for sinks in the bathrooms. The drains from the sinks will extend down the hillside and be used to water the soccer field below.
We had some local help today from one young Thai.
He was a hard worker. Notice that he is wearing flip flops, definitely not OSHA approved footwear for the job. That is very comment foot wear for Thais, even when to an American it would seem better to be wearing shoes of some kind. I imagine their feet are way tougher than mine are. And, or course the climate is such that their feet will rarely, if ever, get cold.
After a a couple of hours we went to the lodge and cleaned up so we go to a church service and lunch (see the next post). After that. we returned to work. We finished digging the trenches for the most part. At the end I was done in the trench using a small trowel to cut the holes under the footers and bring out the mud in my hands. Needless to say, I was not a pretty site at the end of the day.
After dinner, devotions, a phone call to Caroline, it was an early bedtime. I did make it to 8:30 before lights out.
