Friday July 16th

Good morning Sumba! Great to finally be here and ready to start on the water tank.

A lot to tell on this day - will surely miss something important! Will count on the rest of team to add as they feel led!

Good breakfast of instant oatmeal, bread, nutella and tea + a little fruit. Headed to site in 1 jeep and a motor cycle - about 3 miles away on rough roads. Beautiful scenery. Got to site - between Merry Dano's church and their home. Very humble home - a one room structure with a lean to for cooking. Wonderfully sweet people there to assist us - adorable children. Got started on putting together the form for the tank and sifting sand. Concrete is mixed on the ground by forming a bowl shape and adding water to center - then carefully stirring mix from perimeter into the water. That is applied to the tank, and we were having a lot of trouble the first half of the day getting it applied, especially on the side where the sun was directly on it.

We went back to Pastor Elias' for lunch - it's so hard for task oriented people to slow down -some of us would have loved to have had a quick snack and continued, but remembered that we had to go at the pace of our hosts, and that the trip was as much about building relationships as building the tanks.

After lunch Clay had us add more water into the ratio of concrete, sand and water and we finally started to have success! We got most of the exterior done that day which was a huge thing for us. Merry Dano and friends made a snack of baked bananas, tea and coffee. The coffee was grown, roasted and ground right in Baing, and was incredible!

We completed most of the exterior that day and it actually started raining! For an island that gets 8" of rain per year, and never at that time of year, it was amazing and also a God-send. We put a tarp over the tank and it only rained a little, but it was more humid than normal, which was great for allowing the concrete to cure slowly. We started forming the dirt to hold the concrete for the lid. The shape of the lid is formed, then the concrete sacks are placed on top, then the concrete is placed on top of that. The sacks keep the concrete from adhering to the dirt.