Day 9 | Mickey Skeens

Today the 2nd crew got started on their projects, I was able to go back to the church in Chaufford and work with Marcy and Riley. Beautiful drive through the mountains and to the church, last week we were curious of the altitude that we were at. The Baptist Haiti Mission sits at 4,300 feet above sea level. So we down loaded a GPS tracking App that is also an altimeter, from the base camp we can see across the mountain range the highest point that we have to cross and when we were on the point today we were at 5,460 feet. Then we began our decent down the mountain to the river basin and our elevation dropped over 3,000 feet before we reach our work site. Once there we began working on the church, we had to remove everything from the church and then we began removing concrete floor. Lloyd and I used spud bars to pry the slab of concrete up and then the Haitians would hit it with a sledge hammer to bust it in to small pieces. The rest of our team made a line all the way out of the church and passed large pieces of the concrete out until the entire floor was removed. When we were finished we thought it was lunch time and then realized that it was only 10:30 and had only worked an 1 ½. We then laid out 20’ runs of rebar every 12’s and made a grid. We then had to tie every piece of rebar with tie wire on each grid. This process was very rough on the knees and back. I am very thankful for all those that did this and for all the church people that pitched in and helped. The floor is approximately 1,200 square feet. We ran out of rebar for the last 10’ X 30’ section of the floor. Once this is completed they can start mixing the concrete to pour the floor. The remainder of the day was spent sifting sand and playing with the kids.