Home from Abaco

I’ve just reached home and the water tastes so ambrosial! I didn’t realize how thoroughly I’d gotten used to the water filtered on base that had been sitting in a big plastic cube with chlorine in it. It also seems weird to be somewhere with whole buildings and wide lanes of traffic. I can’t wait […]

One week left in The Bahamas!

Very strange that this was our last weekend here and this is our last week! We’ve been working on site Saturday mornings, but other than that we spent the weekend on beaches and it was really quite a perfect last day and a half of free time. I am unbelievably tan—I honestly didn’t know I […]

Pouring concrete

Intense week on the new site pouring concrete, but also really fun! Definitely the workout I was looking for—concrete is crazy heavy and needs to be wheelbarrowed and shoveled and lifted in buckets. Also constructing rebar columns (they are visible sticking out of the walls) and helping the masons lay bricks. Back to it tomorrow […]

Halfway through!

Actually a bit over half. Strange, but then two months isn’t very long. Halfway through and switching schools after finishing the last one is kind of perfect! This one will definitely be more of a challenge but also more of the workout I am looking for, at least if the sun doesn’t get me first. […]

School Finished

We finished our quarantine in time to spend one final week on the school, Every Child Counts, that All Hands has been working on all year. They built four buildings and we mostly helped finish the last one. It was really cool seeing everything come together. We are a lucky cohort because we are getting […]

Quarantine times

This week has been pretty unusual. One of the only two unvaccinated members of our group came down with covid-like symptoms on Friday night and tested positive, so we’ve had to spend the whole week in quarantine from the other “bubbles” on the project. The rest of us have now tested negative and we can […]

Deck finished!

Super fun finishing the deck railing this week. We had to manufacture a bunch more spindles, which involved not only the miter saw but also the table saw. The table saw was only scary before we were taught how it worked, something that could be said about a lot of things in life I suppose. […]

Day off adventures

Saturday mornings we learn about how All Hands and Hearts projects are conceived of and managed, which was actually quite interesting, and then we had the afternoon off. First we drove out to a “blue hole”—a natural super deep swimming hole. The first part of the drive was quite sad, as it was through miles […]

One week down!

So glad the weekend is here! Basically every part of my body hurts, but that’s expected and a good thing! A team of four of us has painted nearly all of three classrooms that each has three smaller adjacent rooms this week. We primed and painted everything including ceilings and our arms are super tired, […]

Tools and lightning

Today we learned how to use tools that I always thought would be more complicated than they actually were. Well, mainly just the saws were much easier and more fun than I expected. All the tools were fun really, and afterwards we practiced what we’d learned by putting together shutters for one of the schools. […]