Wednesday we hit a muerto (bump in the road), which literally translates to a dead person, and that was what it felt like. Luckily I have a great team with positive leaders and we were able to turn it into a mission moment kind of day. Something that made us really evaluate why we are in Costa Rica. But I'll start at the beginning of the day...
The girls at the waterfall.
We got to the worksite at about 9 and started mixing some concrete to continue standing posts. Before the first batch of concrete had been completely mixed they told us to take a break, which seemed weird since we'd only been they about 20 minutes. There were a couple extra engineers around looking at plans and taking measurements, things had seemed a little off since the moment we got there, but we went inside the community center next door to our build site and played cards while we waited for further instruction.
After about an hour Woody came back and said he had some pretty bad news. The local city municipals had decided to widen the street and our house needed to be moved back about 1.3 meters. It was something completely out of the hands of habitat Costa Rica. We were not going to be able to get the walls up this week and we may not even get to build the next couple days. After an initial morale depressor we were able to express how we've all worked in construction before and understand that these things happen, and it was out of anyone's control. The toughest part for me was watching one of the workers tell our homeowner, Doña Florinda, and seeing the disappointment in her face. They estimated that it would be about an extra month before she would be able to move in to her new home.
We spent the remainder of the morning digging out the posts that we'd just sealed with concrete the afternoon before and played through the "what ifs", "if onlys" and "what's something that has been worse than this" game. We had the opportunity to walk around the neighborhood and look at another project of nearly finished habitat homes. We met a family who had recently moved into their home and was going through quite a hardship. The mother in the family needed a transplant, but the hospital would not even put her on the list until she had a stable place to live. She is now on the list but recently discovered that one of her sons who lives in the house with her has cancer and was in a hospital in San Jose. She was incredibly welcoming and happy to share her story and to let us into her. It really helped put things into perspective.
At lunch I brought out the soccer ball and played with some of the kids in the neighborhood. I played some music from my phone and listened to a 5-year-old sing along to Hakkuna Mattata in Spanish. Interacting with these kids and building these connections made the stress from the morning seem less catastrophic. Looking at Habitat's mission statement, the goal is to build homes, communities and hope. Although I came to Costa Rica with hopes of doing the first one, I would now argue that we're having a much stronger impact on the latter two.
After lunch we went to swim and hang out by a river not far from the job site and brought a couple of the kids with us.
For dinner we had the classic Costa Rican dish, Casado (rice and beans) and then a group of about 15 of us went to the local indoor soccer field and played a game against each other. We brought one of the kids from the hotel, a 13-year-old Costa Rican who was easily better than all of us. There were also some players from the game before who stuck around and cheered us on. The whole experience was a lot of fun, a good cap to the day.
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