Day something

Thursday, August 09, 2018
Joyabaj, Quiché Department, Guatemala
Today was the first day we pre-ordered breakfast and it was amazing!!!!! No more waiting on the chefs and stuffing food in our faces attempting to meet the truck. We got to eat to our hearts’ content and were even early for the truck. 
Today was a bit different because Mike was visiting another site with EWB, and Mark and Kassie were signing contracts with the mayor- something that should take an hour at most, so I blocked out five hours. BUT this meant I was head gringo honcho up until 1pm. I didn’t really realize it till we pulled up to site and I got people moving and realized I didn’t have anyone to consult with. I was on my own. At this point I was up above site marking out a trench for storm water drainage, so I got to oversee my site/domain. Pretty cool for a transportation engineer. And I got to do things the way I wanted to do them. SO I had a group of community members come up the hill with me to have their perspective on a good trench layout. I told them my idea and they agreed but eventually came back with revisions. And their revisions were great, obviously, because they know the land and this ain’t their first rodeo like me. After we called the land owner and left a message asking for permission, we all just hung up on the hill for a bit. I get nervous with my Spanish, but honestly not that nervous compared to other languages. I finally put together the pieces in my head to get across the question “what are your names?” And we had a fun time going through names and I got to talk to this one guy near me, William, who is studying to be an English teacher in Joyabaj. He has had English for 3 months and we were able to have a conversation. It was amazing and I really enjoyed talking with him (granted it was not a perfect English/Spanish conversation by any means). I really enjoyed talking with all of them, and was super happy to finally spend time with them. I like them a lot. 
Clato welded the steel plate to the central column pipe- welding up 2.5m in a circle to galvanized steel- not so easy. Like legit one of the toughest welds. Clato pulled it off though and continued welding for the rest of the day. Apparently he LOVES welding, and was giggling even more than usual. Really couldn’t take him haha he cracks me up wayyyy too much. I just felt bad that he was working hard all day and everyone else was basically just sitting around. The construction schedule kinda ended up having to be that way though. It made me feel like a bad project manager though, especially in a time when I really had to prove myself. We came home though and had dinner with the assessment team- they’re assessing in El Aguacate (where we built the bridge last year) for a 3-classroom school. It was super great to see them, especially since of them was from our design team. After dinner, kassie and I had many deep chats back and forth and finally went to bed. 

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