I am writing my first blog, Steven wrote the other three leading up to this.
We finished our last week of Spanish school last week on Friday. After that Steven and I said good bye to our host family and went to the bus station. The father of the house came along with us to help us get on our bus on time because there still is a language barrier even though we have broken it down more. Gladly we bought our tickets earlier that day without our luggage, because at night that place is loud with too many people walking in separate directions. Come to find out our host father, who we now refer to as PD or Pete because we know too many Daniel's here and he's Papa Daniel, found out that we have to take our bigger backpacks to an outside area to drop them off. Once we did that we could see our bus, but we had to go back through the main part of the bus station. So we ran about 100 yds. around this whole place to be where we were at before. All the while we were thinking "what if they left without us but with our bags?" We appreciated all of the work Papa Daniel did for us after that and said our final goodbyes.
Then after a 10 hour bus ride we got to our destination, Santa Cruz. It is a beautiful area surrounding Santa Cruz. It's much like Oregon, lots of green grass and many trees. Santa Cruz has been fairly hot while we have been here, but we're definitely getting used to the daily sunscreen
bathing before heading outside. It didn't take too many sunburns before learning that Supermen get sunburnt too. We are going to be in Santa Cruz for 1 month total
We are here to help and learn from a team that drills wells to give families water. We have already gone on 2 trips and drilled 2 wells this week. Each well at minimum takes about a day to drill and most of the time with prep and everything else it took us a day of prep and a day of drilling. It has been an amazing experience. We work with 3 Bolivians that don't speak English, so we have been using what Spanish we know. Sadly, in school we didn't learn words we would need while working around a drill. So we learn as we go. The men we work with are amazing guys. One of them is 74 years old and he does a lot of the grunt labor. After watching him work I told Steven that either God is going to take me before I'm 74 or I hope I get to be that helpful at his age. Drilling has been some hard work, but we have found a truly great team to learn from.
Thanks for being apart of another Daniel & Steven Blog ;)
Well-Drilling Pictures:
