Almost finished here...

Aldo with our informant

Once again we headed out of the house this past Monday to head to Guayacanes. This time we got out of town a bit earlier on a gua-gua and arrived close to 10 a.m. As we were getting of the bus, we were almost knocked over by a man on a motorcycle carrying a rooster. Aldo stopped him for some small talk and discovered that he was on his way to a cockfight, a quintessential Dominican tradition. We tagged along while he was explaining the rules and differences amongst regions. In this particular case, the roosters were to fight with dull barbs and results were based on a time limit as opposed to a fight to the death.

We sat at a colmado on a back street while people brought roosters from every direction. They decided amongst themselves which ones would fight and the bets started pouring in. I will spare the details for those who think they might disagree with the practice, but we stayed for 2 fights and continued on our way.

We started working just after noon and quickly slipped into the routine of our week. Luis decided that he wanted to put up more houses to get ahead, so all work stopped on the structural accessories and we moved to 4 new foundation and started erecting walls. This was a great opportunity for us to get it in the heads of the workers that they could build with little waste. Aldo and I split up amongst the crews to enforce our ideas. At first, the guys were not excited and we argued over the details, but eventually they realized that it was actually easier to build using spare parts and excess in place of whole panels. Over the course of the week we finally broke some ground and it looks like the remaining houses will be built as originally intended. The site is looking cleaner and it is almost a personal competition for each person to see how efficiently they can build. It took some elbow grease, but finally we saw some results of our case study!

Thursday, we took some time to watch another contractor pour some slabs for another batch of houses. There is also a new water tower in the works so we got to see the foundation elements be put into place.

Aldo surveying the water tower foundation

A crew pours a foundation

Four days straight of plantains and rice started getting to us, so we cut out early Thursday evening and made our way back to Santo Domingo. Friday was a religious holiday akin to Labor Day so the business class had the day off and everyone headed to the beach (Meanwhile the laborers were still out in the field laboring, funny how that works). Luis granted us the day off and we took advantage to rest up and run some final errands in preparation for our departure.

Overall, the last week was a good one to end on. We consider ourselves lucky to have worked with a wide array of people on the project. We learned a great deal, probably more about life than construction.

Us in front of a row of houses in the finishing stages 

Sayer carved this plane out of foam and used water bottle tops for the wheel and propellers