Day 3 - Getting the Irish Rythm going

Sunday 4th-

Today we were all in much finer fettle. With a comparably decent night's sleep behind us and a better idea of what was to happen on the day ahead.
Today I was scaffolding with Maurice. What a job! Scaffolding was very rare at this point in the week and we quickly realised we must be creative if we were to achieve what we needed!
The weather really wasn't very nice - there was little sun, high winds and even some rain. Not what we expected at all! But we put on our rain jackets as a disguise from the other teams and set about literally thieving what pieces of scaffolding that we could and taking it back to our site!

The site is fenced in. It has to be. This is a rather dangerous township and also, because the building is so intense, it is safer for all to have the site separated. The locals now spend their time hanging out of the fence, shouting at us for our names, for any food we may have, for anything we can give them. They also shout thank you's and sing songs through the fence. The local ladies collecting the plastic bottles on site chat to us, they tell us how life is on the township and how difficult life is for them.
One lady, Faldeilah, asked me how Ireland was, what the weather is like. At this point, the sun was out and so I told her it wasn't as nice as this. I thought she would find this amusing, but rather, she didn't understand.
"Nice? You think this is nice?
When it is so windy like this and you are in your bed and the wind is blowing the sand up in your face and you cannot sleep even with your sheet up over your head, that is not nice."

What a way to shut me up...You see, these are the things that we do not understand. Really and truly, I'm not sure that I really understood until the week had to come to its end and I had seen all the facets of the lifestyle of these people and the impact that we made in such a short period of time.

By late afternoon the lemon team had a house ready for painting so we got stuck into that.
Tara, Geraldine and myself got stuck in with 'Pipi' - pronounce it how you like but we liked to call it peepee... As we battled the high winds which literally blew the paint off our rollers and tossed all our paint trays at least once, one local security guard approached Tara.
"That's my house and I wanted it to be blue!"...??? Queue panic!
Well as it turned out, next door was his and we had the blue paint ready for it. Lucky for us, because he really was not very impressed with the peepee!

It's funny really, that man was so adamant that blue was the only colour house he would live in. It seemed odd at first, I thought it a bit cheeky of him. But he wasn't really, afterall, he is paying for his house. But when you look at the shacks where he has lived for the last decade you might ask how could the colour of the house really be important to him?

But it was. What little these people have, wherever they have it, they take the utmost pride in. The children on their way to school wear gleaming white shirts, sorry to say it, but Daz wouldn't have a look in here. Everything is something here - even the bottle tops from our water bottles started new lives as washers as soon as we were done with them.

Then Sunday night was the first night I met Romaney. A friend who I'd worked with almost two years ago in Dublin while she was on holidays from college. It was fantastic to see her but I really was way to tired to have a proper conversation let alone a night out - so we made a date for Tuesday night...