Tuesday, Nov 25: Day 2 of Construction - Rain, Rain Go Away!

Sandra, Cathy, and I were still laying bricks for the better part of the day while Todd and Scott did some dirty work and dug the hole for the waste reservoir. As the hole grew deeper and deeper groundwater seeped in and filled the bottom of the hole with mucky water.

At the first site one of the men from the family took on the messy job of getting into the hole to remove mud to make it an appropriate depth to accommodate the concrete rings that form the waste reservoir; since we had less help at this site, Scott ended up taking on this task. This waste reservoir also had a different configuration than the last; instead of having two shorter reservoirs, with the second one functioning as an overflow reservoir, we had one very deep reservoir with four rings stacked on top of each other. This meant that Scott was stuck in a seven-foot deep hole, knee deep in muddy water for the better part of the morning, what a trooper!

After lunch we were able to start working on plastering some of the outside walls and filling in the inside foundation of the latrine with soil. But, we didn’t manage to get very far along before some dark clouds accompanied with loud claps of thunder came rolling in. It wasn’t long before the rain came pouring down; we all worked quickly to cover up our work and to save the mortar and cement from getting soaked. We were especially concerned about all that plaster that had just been applied to the exterior of the building! We hung out for a while playing cards and hoping that the weather would pass so that we could get back to work, but the rain was coming down really hard!

Our workday was cut short and it seemed that the weather was following us back to Kep. We were planning on heading down to the crab market to eat at ‘Kimly’ once again, but by the time dinner rolled around, there was water rushing down the streets like a river. With this in mind, we decided to eat closer to home, plus Vy was planning on walking from her accommodations to meet us and she would have been soaked! We were going to eat downstairs at our hotel but we saw some umbrellas stacked in a corner; since the rain had let up a bit and we didn’t need a boat to get through the streets anymore we headed about five minutes away to grab some pizza. It was totally worth the little trek and we didn’t even get that wet! We were really crossing our fingers that the rain wasn’t so bad at the jobsite but we will have to wait until morning to see.

Sarah Armstrong
DWC Team Leader
Cambodia, November 2014