Crestwicke Team from Guelph

We recently had a team here from Crestwicke Church in Guelph Ontario. This team was special to many here in Peru because it uncluded Sarah and Lalo, a couple who used to live here in Peru and had spent a lot of time with the children in the home. Sarah helped a lot with making decisions for hosting the team and also checking in on the jobs that people were doing to make sure they were doing okay. She also oraganized lots of interaction between the team and the children. Lalo spent all of his time here fixing the minstry vehicles. That was a need that he saw soon after arriving here and it falls under his skills as an auto repair expert. Our cars are running great now and their suspensions are better suited for the road to Pachacamac. Some of the team helped by installing electricity in the workshop. They ran the wires from the panel at the street, back to the shop. There they installed a breaker panel and ran a line of outlets around the workshop. This is going to make a huge difference in for my project for November which is installing closets in the moms rooms. These are closets that we rescued from the old children's home which I will modify to fit the openings in the new homes.

Another job that I had for this team was to decorate the pump shed that Calvary Baptist from Oshawa had built for us last year. This team had some skilled artists on it so I gave them the freedom to decorate it in any way they saw fit. It turns out they included many of the kids in the drawing and painting which the kids really enjoyed. The shed turned out great and everyone who had a hand in it should be very proud.

The team also did lots of painting and gardening during their time here. Above is our food deposit which the team cleaned and painted and then planted flowers and flower seeds in new gardens that they dug. The team also scraped and painted 3 houses on the outside and repainted 1 house on the inside. They got lots of work done in only a week here and also had time to visit a few families in Manchay with Brenda. Friday night 11 of them went home and 5 went on to Machu Picchu to enjoy the sites there.

In the next month, as mentioned above, I will be installing closets in the moms rooms and Eduardo will be enjoying vacations. Then in December my family and I will be going to Canada for 2 1/2 months. During this time my plan is to leave Eduardo making sidewalks throughout the property in Pachacamac. This will finish off many areas that are almost done and it will cut down on lots of dust. It will also help define the area that we have for our jumbo playground that is coming next July.

The Juniper Tree Goes Country

If some of you remember to way back more than a year ago, there was a blog post about a team at our Pachacamac site that had befriended a sheep living on the property. Well we never could have imagined that one lonely sheep could have led to the group of animals we are amassing now at the Juniper Tree. We have started to raise rabbits. These are New Zealand rabbits which grow to be very big and will soon need to be moved to individual cages to continue to grow bigger.

We also have a pig. He is a young male and he recently had this nice new pen built for him. Now that he has such a beautiful house to live in, we are thinking it is time to start looking for a wife that he can share it with.

Our ducks continue to multiply with this bunch just being born last week. Their mother is keeping them close by up until now, but it won't be long until she starts taking them to the ducks new swimming pond that we made a few weeks ago. We also have two goats roaming the property at the Juniper Tree, helping us keep the grass cut. We are thankful that all these animals have been provided for our home and we are excited about what the children can learn from looking after them and also for the potential food source that they all provide for us.

Hespeler Team 2010

To help us put a huge push on to the end of completing our sports court, we called on the crew from Hespeler Baptist Church. They brought out the big guns this year sending 4 couples, the women to supervise the men, and found Brittany from Hamilton to oversee everything. Mike started the week pumping up his muscles with some arm wrestling with the kids and they were off to work.

Here George is pouring cement around centre court. The team worked hard all week, mixing and pouring cement as well as taking some time to help with some gardening in Manchay. The ladies also did some visiting with some of the families in Manchay. Things were going well but we still felt the need to have Ashley come back for her fourth visit, just to back up Brittany.

By the end of the week, the team had accomplished what was set out for them. The sports court was 90% complete and plenty big enough for the kids to skip, rollerblade and spin their tops on. Thank you Hespeler Baptist for your continued support of our ministry here in Peru.

Starting the Sports Court

We have recently been working on the sports court at the Juniper Tree Home. This will be a centerpiece for the activities at the home. We have the court about half finished and then we will be levelling the rest of the land. In two weeks we have another team coming in from Hespeler Baptist Church in Canada, and we hope to be able to finish the concrete pad with them.

The outside of our workshop is finished with the doors being installed and painted the other week. I am planning on buying some pegboard to instal on the walls inside to help us organize our tools and materials. Seen in the picture above is actually only a little more than half of the size of the finished building. This part will serve as a tool storage room and a carpentry shop.

Happy Birthday Dad

Today is my dads birthday. My family is coming later this week to visit us and I am hoping to get away and enjoy some trout fishing in the Andes Mountains with my dad. I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish him a very happy birthday.

Old Friends Come to Visit

The past couple weeks our friends Kim and Keith Collins have been here with their 2 daughters. This was a special time for many missionaries here in Lima and extra special for our kids who are great friends with the Collins girls. A couple years ago Keith brought a team of young people out to the Oasis to help with some landscaping. This year as well, they brought a group to help for one day. We have an upcoming family day at the Oasis, I took this opportunity to get some painting and cleaning done. The team painted the front gate and fences, the window protectors on the office and cleaned the rooftop storage area. They also sanded and varnished all of our park benches.

Shannon's Family Team

This past week we had Shannon's family's team here. Some of them had been here before but it was nice for them to be working at the Juniper Tree home, since they had only seen it as an empty lot the last time they were here. The team started the week by finishing the wood trim on the new shop and then painting it.

The last time the team was here they mixed and poured the cement pad for our guards house at the Oasis in Manchay. This time they got involved one step sooner in the process and cut and tied the rebar grid that goes inside the cement. This was the start of our sports court at the Juniper Tree Home.

In all the team got 1/4 of the terrain levelled for the sports court and mixed and poured 3 sections of concrete. This project will be ongoing as it is comprised of 16 sections for a total size of 18 meters by 25 meters. This will be considerably larger than the sports court we had at our old home and will serve for playing soccer, volleyball and basketball as well as things like jumping rope and bike riding.

The team took Friday off to go visit some pre-incan ruins that are north of Lima. That meant that they wanted to work on Saturday. It was decided that we would work hard in the morning and get another section of concrete done and then celebrate a great week by preparing Pachamanca. This is a Peruvian specialty which consists of heating rocks over a fire, then putting the rocks in the bottom of a pit with potatoes and sweet potatoes. Then meat is added ontop of the rocks, in our case chicken, then sweet corn mash wrapped in husks is added as well as beans still in the pod. The whole thing is then covered in some kind of leafy herb then paper sugar bags and covered up with soil. The whole thing stays buried for a few hours while being cooked from below by the hot rocks. It was a special Saturday lunch that was enjoyed by team members, staff and children alike.

Holy Trinity Church Team

This past week we hosted a very fun team from Holy Trinity Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Our main focus for them for the week as far as construction, was framing and covering the new workshop. They worked hard and many of them discovered hidden talents that they didn't know they had. The workshop structure got done and cladded in its "Superboard" covering and they got a good start on the wood trim until our nail gun decided to get jammed.

Above is a picture of the team along with Tyler, Eduardo and Mucho Machi. (how did Machi get so tall?) The week went so well that on the last day, the women toured several homes in Manchay with Brenda delivering some small grocery items along the way, and then we all met at lunch and decided to go tour the ruins in Pachacamac. Thank you Holy Trinity team for helping us get our workshop finished. It will serve as a base for the rest of the construction and will also house our carpentry shop where we can teach a skill to many of the teens in our home.

Door Creek Team

This past week we hosted a service team from Door Creek Church in Wisconsin. The team was made up of a youth group with a couple of leaders. They worked really hard and managed to clear and level the ground for our new workshops. Then they tied the rebar grid that goes inside the floor and mixed and poured 75 loads of concrete. The floor looks great and we are now working on the structure of the shops with the team we have this week. Also accomplished by the team was cutting and installing pine trim on our clothing deposit as well as painting that building. Aside from all the work that the team accomplished in only a week, they also managed to spend quite a bit of time getting to know the kids in the home and one young lady spent some time teaching English to one of the older girls in our home. This was a great group of young people and we hope to see them return in years to come. Thank you Door Creek team for all your hard work and support.

June 2010 Update

Hello blog readers. Sorry for not posting for a long time. I have been wanting to do a post about what we have been working on but hadn't gotten any good pictures. Well finally I decided it was time to post something anyways without pictures.
We have been more of a salvage team than a construction team lately. As many of you know, we have moved our children's home to its new site and that meant that the old home was available to rescue any and all materials that could be used by us our people we know. It is very likely that the old site will be sold mainly for the land so we have been removing most of the wood (wood being very valuable here in the middle of a desert) and much of the roofing material. Also being removed are many of the doors and sinks and toilets. Most of them, being quite old and not fitting into our current decorating scheme, are being taken to the Oasis where many of the families that we minister to will be able to take them home and use them. A large shed has been removed from the property as well and next week we will be installing it a the Juniper Tree home as our new work shop. This building will also house our new carpentry shop where we will be teaching the older kids skills that they can use in the future. We also removed a large structure that houses our clothing donations and we have reinstalled it at the Juniper Tree.
Recently we received a large donation that will enable us to pour the concrete sports court as well as finishing many of the final touches on the houses. We have many teams coming over the next 3 months so this is a very exciting time for us at KAI Peru construction. We are hoping to be able to advance the work alot in the rest of this year.

End of January Update

Well we have successfully hosted the Calvary team once again. They were amazing with the amount of work they accomplished and really gave us a big push towards being ready for our new children's home move-in. Among the many things that the team did was installing the pressure tank seen in the picture above and built this little shed around it to protect it from the elements and the kids. We painted it white for now to protect the wood and will one day soon let the kids get creative and paint a mural on it.

Since the teams departure we have been nusy organizing different trades coming in to install their products. We had 4 more exterior doors finished and installed and have ordered 3 more doors that should be finished in a couple weeks. We have had windows in house 6 installed and just today bought the materials for the 5th houses windows. Tomorrow the countertops are coming to begin their installation. Eduardo and Roy and I will continue with the tile installation in house 6 while monitoring all of these trades.

For those of you who are following the blog with regularity may have noticed that I just changed the house numbering system that I have been using to date. From here on out we will be referring to the houses in the order they appear on the plans starting from the lower right corner being house 1 and going to the top left corner being house 6. So in our order of things we have houses 1,2,3,5 and 6 built. House 4 has yet to be built.

Calvary Baptist From Oshawa

This week we have a team here from Calvary Baptist in Oshawa, Ontario. This is a team that came twice last year and quickly earned themselves a reputation for working hard and being very organized. As many of you know we will be moving our children's home into the new home at Pachacamac soon and this team is key in getting the houses ready in time. This year, because of the economic situation around the world our team numbers are down a lot so each team is so crucial.

Among the things that this team has accomplished are installing a electrical service panel at the street and completely wiring houses 4 and 5. They dug and installed a new grounding pit for the next three houses. They painted house 5 and installed its doors. They dug many trenches and laid water pipe and are installing a pressure tank to provide good water pressure to the property.

This next week the team is tackling a small building project at the house of one of the moms from our project. We have also bought tiles and will be installing them as well as toilets in house 4. As far as where we are on projects outside of the team, this week we are installing windows in house 4 and will be getting countertops for houses 3 and 4. Also in the works are all of the exterior doors for houses 3, 4 and 5. So as you can see there is a lot happening at Kids Alive Construction and as more pictures become available and as we get closer to our move-in date I will be making more posts on the blog.