A Cement Floor
Volunteer Russ Edworthy of Calgary, Alberta, funded a cement floor for a local family with small children and then spent a day working on it. Here is Russ with Maria before the job begins.
The home of Maria, Fidel and their 7 chlldren is just a small room made from sticks and a few planks. They do not have electricity.
Their kitchen consists of a lamina roof with a stove of cement block under it.
And the washing station is serviced with a hose that leads to a plank nailed to two uprights with palm leaves to shield bathers from the street.
We found this poor malnourished puppy in the corner of the house when we arrived. He wandered out into the yard and died before the construction even began.
Russ, with his helpers, spent the first hour levelling the floor, which was about a foot higher at the door end than at the other end because of the water from the rains washing through the house.
In typical Peten style, the materials (cement, sand and stones) that were scheduled to arrive at 8:30 a.m., didn’t arrive until 4 pm, and via a very roundabout route. The first truck went off the road on the way up the hill, and it took the hardware store the rest of the day to find another (and smaller) truck to offload the materials and take three loads up the hill via an alternate route. So, the workers didn’t get started until after 4 pm … and finished up at 11 pm, working for the last 5 hours by candlelight.
The floor, however, turned out beautifully. Fidel has been keeping it wet for the first 24 hours so that it dries slowly enough and doesn’t crack. The weather cooperated fully and we didn’t get any rain for the two nights that the family slept out under the stars while the cement dried.
Fidel, Maria and their 7 kids are thrilled with their new floor. It will mean that they have a place to work and play that is clean and free of parasites. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, RUSS, for helping to improve the health and the lifestyle of this campesino family.