Each family has to be very involved in their home, and work in community with the other families.
Our land slants significantly, so before we began excavating for the foundation, we had to mark all the land with excavation depths. I am re-checking the depth on my first marker because it serves as the reference for all the others (I'd hate to lose days of work because of mixing inches and centimeters)!
Those who have worked with me will appreciate this photo-- in typical fashion, I have a notebook for each house that we are using to track the progress each day, sketch drawings, keep track of materials, etc.
No way am I relying on my own memory to track 15 houses!
We had to get all dressed up for a photo for a newspaper article that is being written about the project, so we took advantage of being clean to take some of our own pics.
And I succeeded in one of my personal goals-- getting Bolivians to actually smile during a picture!
The very first thing we had to build was a place to hold water for the construction. We´ll place them around the lots in order to have water access to mix cement. There isn't running water yet to our neighborhood (we have to build that), so in the meantime we'll get to horse deliveries a week to have water.
Everywhere you see a ditch we will have rebar horizontal frames to create the foundation. We will cover the rebar with cement. At the corners we will have rebar columns.
All of the Habitat houses have real concrete floors, unlike 90% of the homes here in Bolivia, which have just dirt flooring. We will put rocks down then fill concrete around and above the rocks.
Having a non-dirt floor is one of the main factors in preventing illness and maintaining sanitary conditions with sewage and bugs. So the sight of our first truckload of rocks yesterday was pretting exciting stuff.
The families will rotate keeping watch over the bricks by building a shelter and spending the night there.
