8 Mar, Tues

Tues, 8 Mar. up at 6am to meet the group at 7am to go Flowers Bay where we will be preparing an area that will some day become a 'marketplace' to sell local arts and crafts. it is a project to involve the Village Women and enable them to make some money from the cruise ship people. this is the area, .... in the back you can see (barely) a bamboo structure. we are working in the back of this home, which belongs to Veronica and her husband. the project will also include a building made out of plastic bottles!!!!!!!!!! i had not heard of this before, but you can Google it. basically they tightly pack plastic bottles with sand, cap them, and then stack them with mortar in between to make walls. but, that is a long way off. notice the 'columns' in the front yard ... made out of plastic bottles. close up view of plastic bottle columns. right now we are preparing the land. they recently had torrential rains which flooded the area. so one task is digging trenches around the perimeter and using the dirt as fill, to build up the center so when it rains again, it won't flood. and, we are NOT talking about sandy soil as i expected, it's hard dry CLAY here. it's grueling work using a pick axe and a shovel. 2 of us work on this project. it is hard work, requiring a lot of breaks and water, ...but my favorite job. ...on the ass end of a shovel ... just like being home in the garden ! trench on the left of photo, piling the soil on the right side of the trench. it will eventually be smoothed out to fill in low areas. another task requires 3-5 girls, sitting in a pile of sand, packing and capping plastic bottles. another 3-5 haul bottles, filled and unfilled, and sort bottles, and putting them in bags and piles. another 3-5 were sent to the beach for more clean-up ... a disgusting job. i had this duty for a few hours in the morning, but managed to steer clear of it the rest of the day. 4 days of beach clean up is enough for me for awhile. :( during the afternoon, a TV crew came out and interviewed the beach clean-up crew, ... they were on TV that night! in the afternoon, Veronica and Heather (the lead from the Marine Park) went to buy fish for lunch tomorrow !!!!!!!!!!!!! can't wait for that! while they were gone, Tony cut coconuts for the group. and we all had a refreshing replenishing drink. the group worked until 5pm when they went to a meeting with the Village Women to talk about the project. i begged off and left around 3pm and worked on the internet, then home to shower and back down to The Sundowner to meet Marti again. we really have been having some wonderful sunsets lately! this one is taken from in front of my room. Marti and i left Sundowner around 7pm and attended a West End Town Meeting regarding putting in a sewer system and paving the main road. town meetings are the same everywhere and reminded me of the meeting i attended trying to get sewers put in around Sherman Lake ! we finally left there around 8pm and headed for the bar that was having All-You-Can-Eat wings for US$1. needless to say, it was packed, we waited over an hour for 5 wings each, and then left. they were VERY good wings, but if we do it again we'll get there at 6pm before the rush! i told Marti about my desire/commitment to go to Cayos Cochios before i leave. she has been there before, but wants to go back. so we are planning to go together ! yeahhhhhhhh! she also knows how to sail and is going to see if she can meet up with someone who has a yacht here in the harbor that might be going to Cayos, that maybe we could catch a ride with. i have no idea how to go about doing that, but she does. :)