Back to Reality

Well we've been slacking a little on the updates since our weekend in Ohrid. The weather continues to be great...it's been mid-high 30's since we arrived and some days, like today, even mid-40's! We are getting quite the farmer tans though... if you look closely we look like we are wearing white gloves! :)

We headed back to the worksite on Monday with some newbies... the American team arrived while we were in Ohrid. Come to find out, we are quite the territorial team... rushing off the bus to get the "good" seats (with backs) in the office, changing out of flipflops into work clothes and sneakers before booting it up the hill to claim "our" spots! :) We left the Americans in the pit... digging the rock while we were making rectangles and cutting rebar to Sheri's tunes, singing and dancing away! Nice, eh? :) haha

We've been eating and drinking well as usual... any notion of losing weight on this trip has quickly flown out the window. Supper consists of unlimited amounts of bread, taratura (tzatziki dip), fried zucchini, mixed salads (cabbage, cucumber, tomato, carrot, cheese), chicken/pork kabobs, steak, grilled ham and cheese... the list goes on and on...

Sadly tomorrow is our last day at the worksite. We will be sad to see our construction friends, adopted puppy Mirko (the so-called watchdog who lives at the site which we look after every day), the families, Vane (our driver), Milan (our FANTASTIC Habitat affiliate coordinator, and of course, the wonderful team members we have become so close with over the last two weeks. After the day's work tomorrow we will drive back to our hotel in Negotino and have a farewell dinner with the families we are building for as well as others from the Habitat Macedonia Affiliate... the time has flown by much too fast...

Even though we are helping to build 3 fairly large buildings which will be part of a village of Habitat units, we are able to see progress. For instance, we worked on trusses for the first few days nailing hundreds and maybe thousands of nails. Yesterday the workers hauled up the first truss by hand. 4 guys with ropes pull it up the side of the home. By today, one roof had pretty well all its trusses installed. We tend to claim some of them as "ours" and even though they are likely all the same, we tend to "ID" the one we worked on from below and walk a little taller when passing by the building. ;-)