Buenas Dias from San Fernando, in fact this will be my last blog from this city as we leave for Villarica late tomorrow afternoon.
What a day it has been as we rose bright and early for breakfast at 7:35. We had been up late Tuesday as we held our team dinner at a local restaurant, La Trattoria Tuscano. While the name is Italian, the dinner was a traditional Chilean meal. Most of us had Salmon which was fresh from the Pacific garnished with a mushroom sauce. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we are very much in the "garden area" of Chile, so we had lots of veggies and fruits. At dinner we said our good-byes to Nydia who has to be back in Harlingen to preach with her husband at their home church. Nydia was a welcome addition to the trip. She is very proud of the ten years she served in the region, both in Curico and San Fernando along with her husband. I had the chance to interview her at length and she mentioned to me the church in Curico was a "dump" before she was able to raise funds to build what has become a beacon in the community.
We know we don't have much time left to complete our task so we didn't waste any daylight hours. In fact we worked so late this evening (9:30 p.m.) we had to take taxis back to the hotel because the bus had stopped running. But even though it was a long day we got a lot done. The most difficult task is building the frame work for the ceiling/floor boards to fit on to. By the dinner hour, we had all the fitted cross beams up except for one. While on paper it seems to be a fairly simple task, not all boards are true, so each beam and cross beam has to be custom made. The drill was to make all the measurements, cut the necessary boards, build the beams on the ground and then hoist them into the rafters. Again on paper it should work, but it seem every time we hoisted the beams, some adjustments had to be made. Kudos to Carl Sandlin and Vicki Roussel for the "Yankee Engineering" to get the job done.
After dinner we had a couple of hours of daylight, remember it's summer here and there's daylight savings, so we attached the final beam and then hoisted three sets of six ceiling/floor boards into the rafters. We believe we should be able to finish the task by the afternoon tomorrow, that is if we don't have any setbacks.
Speaking of setbacks, we had a near miss when a wind gust knocked down a section of the roof. When I write this, it sounds serious, and it could have been, but it's bascially causing us a minor inconvenience. While we were working on the beams, some wind caught the tin roofing material which is badly fastened to the top side of the building. Not the top mind you, but some siding which was poorly nailed to some, for a lack of a better term, bricks. Some of the stones fell to the ground as well as three aluminum sheets, (So I guess you could say we all were three sheets to the wind.) Fortunately no one was standing along the sidewalk when the stuff fell, and we thank God for that. One of our last task tomorrow will be to cut out a plywood surface and attach it to the side of the roof rafters. We will then nail in the aluminum sheeting and seal it, certainly improving what was there.
It is late, I will try again to attach some pictures to the blog, but if there are none, know that it is because the "file" is too large for the internet from here. Last night I spent a great deal of time trying to post pictures, but the program wouldn't let me.
No comments:
Post a Comment