House Building in the Village

Building a house in the village has been a trip.

Like a rollercoaster.

I hate rollercoasters.

How exciting, right? To be able to layout your own floorplan and have things just as you want them, customized to your family's needs!

But then it comes time to actually build… and no one shows up…

The biggest issue has been the sickness of my village papa and his death. There's bad "ju-ju" in a place with a sick man and no one wants to be doing the already dangerous work of construction when there's bad "ju-ju". Those times that Nikloas was in town, his son Justin would be struck down with something or another and it was just bad "ju-ju" all up in that place. 

So work was minimal at best and usually only done by my village brothers, uncles, and cousins. So like 5 guys.

Then Nikloas died and the contractor was genuinely terrified that if he did work that it would be dishonoring to the deceased and he would be struck down and die and he had a family to worry about so that wasn't going to happen for the whole two weeks of the time of mourning. And my village family couldn't continue their efforts because they were under the prescripted time of mourning the dead during which they had to abstain from work.

So FINALLY all that was over and people were coming EVERYDAY to work on the house. But we're dealing with bush materials so every bit of frame work had to be cut down in the jungle and left to dry out and brought into the village and have all the knots whittled off of it BEFORE it could be cut to size and nailed into place. It was a week and a half of solid work before our helicopter came to take us away. By then the frame was pretty much done and half the rafters were up.

I have NO idea what's been going on for the past month but I have some suspicions based on the fact that my roof isn't up yet.

Today, Monday June 12th, they're supposed to finish(?) putting up the second half of my roof and communities are supposed to come to cut down bamboo from the jungle and weave our walls. (We're scheduled to go out June 16th)

So tonight, we'll get a phone call with a progress report and an evaluation on whether or not this is going to be done by Thursday. Then we have a decision to make.

So hopefully, when they put their hand to the work, they'll realize, "oh most of the external walls are windows and most of the internal walls are doors and there's actually a fairly modest amount of wall space that needs to be worked. Whoa! Look! We finished!"

Update: Yeah… No such luck. The roofing iron is supposed to go on Tuesday, June 13th and the community is supposed to come Wednesday June 14th. So we're delaying our trip until we get the word that they're DONE, which SHOULD be within the next two weeks. 

They broke ground on this project in November. It's been 7 months now. 7 long long months.

Please pray for this because the Matthew to the Mum project gets affected by changes to our schedule.