Cement Floor Building with Karen Topolinski
Meet Karen Topolinski, a Canadian woman who collected funds before coming to Guatemala to help several campesino families build a cement floor in their home. Here, she is with Edgar Adelio, our Floors Coordinator as they are beginning a floor in the home of Brenda Luis Valenzuela.
Its hard to imagine what it is like to step out of bed every morning onto a dirt floor, to put the kids down to play on a dirt floor, and to try to keep yourself, your family and your house clean with a dirt floor! Yet the worst part of it is the parasites that either live in the dirt floor, or are carried by the sand fleas that live in the dirt floors. It is a huge health risk for everyone, but particularly for the young children who are just learning to crawl and walk.
A donation of $125. and your help as a volunteer or as part of a group of volunteers (4 or 5 people often go together to fund and build a floor) will pay for your building guide (Edgar) and build a floor of 12 sq meters for a family who doesn’t have one.
Here is the house where the family of 5 live … you can see the kitchen just around the back corner … it consists of an outdoor fire and table and chairs under a large square of metal supported by 4 posts.
Karen also put a floor in this small house of a young family just starting out. They have built their house from sticks, with a metal roof.
The kitchen is just to one side on a lower level, with an outdoor fire and table with stumps for stools and a large sheet of black plastic tied overhead to protect from the sun and the rains.
For the last several volunteer cement floor builders, we have paid their lunch money to the families whose floor is being built, and they make a local/traditional meal for the volunteers. This program has been very successful, all the volunteers have had good lunches (and some have had superb lunches), and the volunteers really get a good sense of how the people live.
Pouring a cement floor is lots of hard work mixing, shovelling and carrying heavy buckets full of cement Notice how open the walls of the house are and imagine how much water floods through there when the jungle rains beat down.
This house was so small that there was extra cement that they used to pour a pad just outside the door, a spot which functions as a “living area” in sunny weather. Here is the family from the left, Maribel Ramirez Najera with her daughter Yusmari, Maribel’s dad, Filipe, who lives next door and was available to help, her husband, Estuardo, Edgar (the cement floor expert) and Karen. In this photo you can see the black plastic kitchen roof.
The third and final floor that Karen funded and helped to build was in the home of Doña Eugenia Zetino, who was so thankful that after living for 70 years with a dirt floor, she was finally going to experience the cleanliness of a cement floor!!
After she had completed 3 floors, the Dentistry for All group arrived at Project Ix-canaan to begin their week of dental care for the village, and Karen became a volunteer for the Dental Journey. However, she still had more funds for cement floors to be built after she left, and we will be highlighting the ones that are chosen over the next short while.
THANKS, KAREN, for the lasting gifts that you have left in the village!!