Lotus Children’s Centre – Day 3&4

Today was spent repairing the kids outdoor play equipment, with lots of little helpers swinging hammers, sawing bits of wood and having fun whacking nails and screws into anything they could find.

After lunch, together with two Mongolian guys, we mixed 6 bags of cement and laid a concrete slab as a base for another ger. It was solid work shoveling sand and blue metal and mixing by hand, then trowling the cement smooth. I know my back will feel it tomorrow.

It was only after chatting with “Bolt”, the local maintainence guy, who indicated to me that that one of the other guys I’d been working with four the last 4 days, was deaf. For nearly a week, we’d been building and labouring, laughing and joking and I hadn’t even realised, since we didn’t have a common language between us.

The following day I spent in the kitchen, cooking lunch, followed by commencing work building a new pit toilet. Fortunately the hole had already been dug by a backhoe, a good job, over 3M deep. So we measured and cut steel beams to form the floor structure, once that was done it started to rain again, so that was the end of the work in the field, especially as we were using an extension cord made of 7 different pieces of wire, with a little bit of electrical tape holding it together (but not covering the exposed wire). I wondered if my insurance would pay out on that potential industrial accident!