Day 10

Today our team was split into two separate groups. One group visited the clinic again while the other went to the women’s center to break rocks into gravel and dig out boulders from the side of a hill. We were given pickaxes and a heavy duty pry bar to take care of the boulders, and hammers to smash the little rocks into smaller ones. After roughly a half hour of digging out smaller boulders from the hillside, Pete, Tim, Dr. Northrup, and I took it upon ourselves to dig out the biggest boulder we could see. In order to get to the big boulder, we needed to first get out a few other massive rocks. We used our superior engineering skills to find the best points to pry from to make the large boulders come tumbling down the hillside into the pile that was at the bottom. As time passed, one by one the massive rocks came tumbling down, bringing us closer to getting out “the big one”.  After about an hour and fifteen minutes of trying to get it out of the hillside, we decided to take a 20 minute break to refuel for the epic battle. After the break we went back to work with only one more rock standing in the way of glory. As I was prying out the last rock before “the big one” could be reached, Alyssa noticed that it was not as stuck into the side of the hill as we had thought. With a little extra effort, it came right out, and the glory was ours.

After lunch we all walked to the reforestation project for our next job of the day. When we arrived, we were given the task of preparing individual bags of dirt that would be used to begin life’s journey for hundreds of trees. We were divided into three separate teams, and Dr. Northrup said that the team that bagged the most dirt would win an ice cream treat. All together we must have bagged at least 700 parcels of dirt. After we had completed that task, the leader of the reforestation project told us about all of the different trees that he grew on his farm along with their uses.

We finished our day with a talk given by the only doctor at the local health clinic. He talked about how the clinic was started, their major challenges, and how people can get involved in the future by helping out the clinic.

-Mike