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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Beaches and building

Went to the most amazing teal Caribbean beach on Sunday. The water was totally clear and the sand was white. Tried to snorkel but not much to see, just water and sand. Monday we went back to work and I opted to do something besides paint. The last two days I’ve been putting together deck […]

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. […]