First day of construction

The missionaries we're working with down here are Tom and Lisa Kaiser. I'm looking forward to learning more about their story.

One of Tom's last words last night was "breakfast at 6:30am." For the record, Barbados is 2 hours ahead of Central Time so some quick math means we're up at 4:00am. Yikes!

Everyone had trouble getting to sleep. The cabin has bunks, and I had the top of one while Barrett was down below. The width of each is less than a twin bed so I had this recurring "Don't move" theme going on all night. Barrett likes to read at night to get his mind ready for sleeping, but when lights went out in the cabin, we're talking serious darkness. Even the light of my Palm was too bright so it took B a while to shut down.

Outside there were interesting and bizarre sounds of frogs, birds, and (could it be?) monkeys!

Eventually we all fell asleep. There were the snorers, of course. But the big surprise to Barrett was how loud Grandpa Bill could fart in his sleep! Sorry, Grandpa. It's the truth.

Breakfast was bacon and eggs. Rumor is that tomorrow we're having eggs and bacon. That'll be a good change! :) Add juice and toast and we're ready to roll.

We spent the day carrying blocks, striking mortar joints, and being "go for's". Grandpa Bill let us both lay a block, which was very cool. He and Ron Anderson are the only bricklayers by trade so there's a lot of pressure on them to keep moving. Despite that pressure, they are both a lot of fun to be with and took time to teach us how to do things. Barrett is quite good at striking joints and I was glad to learn how to use the block saw.

It rained about every 2 hours, for about 5 minutes. It actually felt pretty good because it was pretty hot the rest of the time.

Lunch is the big meal down here. Think chicken smothered (and I mean that in a good way) with a curry based sauce. Put that on a bed of brown rice, add a side of cucumbers and top it off with fried bananas. I'm glad Barrett isn't a picky eater (either that or he's just really hungry). :)

Two walls up later, the day ended around 5:00pm and it was off to the showers. Jim Rinkenberger brought these very cool (or should I say HOT) contraptions that allow us to take hot showers. Check this out... think thick plastic bag that's clear on one side and black on the other. Fill it with 5 gallons of water and then let sit in the sun for the day. We took showers with water that was 104 degrees because of Jim! Yahoo!

Dinner was a burger. We're not sure if it was meat or veggie. Enough said.

Time for Barrett to play the keyboard and for us to try to connect with Mommy, Z, and Christa via Yahoo Messenger with Voice. After enough tries it finally works! Yahoo for Yahoo! Only 10 cents a minute (where the local phone would have been more like $3/minute).

We watched a presentation from some missionaries who recently took a trip to Guyana and then headed to bed. Lights out around 10:00pm Local after Barrett kicks my butt in Rummy.

Ah. A very nice Day 1.