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.

International Visitors

Today we hosted a work team from an international Christian school here in Lima. The kids were great fun and very hard workers. They helped us by sanding all the walls and ceilings in the 5th house and then painting primer on the walls. They also did some landscaping behind house 3 getting ready to put grass there. Another group of them helped us by digging a couple really big holes so that we can transplant some trees onto the property.

We had hosted a team from this school a few years ago at the care center in Manchay where they did some painting for us as well. These kids were so respectful and really enjoyed themselves during their time with us.

Thank you to all of the students and teachers who joined us in Pachacamac to help us further our building project there. Hope to see you next year.

The Chickens Have Arrived

As mentioned a couple posts ago we now have a new, really cool chicken coop. The coop was built because we had a couple donors that wanted to buy us some chickens. We had also received some money from our missions gift catalogue. Well I hooked up with our good friend Jeff Morgan and we went for a tour of the chicken operations at the agricultural university and we brought home 10 beautiful HyLine Brown hens. They are a breed that are excellent egg layers and in their first 2 days with us they have given us 17 eggs.

The chicken coop is a huge hit with the hens although they haven't quite gotten the hang of using the nesting boxes yet. We have found eggs on the floor, under the ladder, half way up the ladder and right beside the feed tray. The hens seem very happy in their new home and the kids at the children's home are very happy to have their new friends. So the next time you come on a work team, who knows, you may be eating farm fresh eggs right from our very own chickens.

The Beauty Within

As many of you who have been here to Peru this year will know, we have a pretty major project underway in our waste water treatment system. It is a system that receives all of the waster water from the houses on the property. This water enters the system at a two chambered holding tank where the liquids are seperated from the solids, the solids are then broken down by bacteria and the liquids pass on to the next stage. That next stage is a partical filter that uses plants on the surface to use nutrients found in the water. Then the water passes into a pond where aquatic plants and fish and other life clean the water further. The water can then be used to water the grass and gardens. This system takes a long time to get up to full functionality especially the filter and all of its plants.

Yesterday we were working on the fence around the system and I got the idea for this blog entry. While the system has a certain odor that is not always enjoyable, I thought that the plants and insects that are found in its filter deserve to be seen and enjoyed. I don't know all the names of all the plants that I have growing in here but this one always catches my eye and yesterday it caught the attention of this little bee that was visiting our filter. In fact we have a lot of bees coming to visit the flowers and also taking advantage of a water source.

These lovely flowers are Canna Lillies that a friend of mine, Jeff Morgan, introduced to the filter and they just love it in there. They are thriving and have numerous new flowers each day. Jeff has been a great help with this project and has been experimenting to find out which plants do well in the filter and which do not. He has found some grasses that grow amazingly well that we can cut and feed to rabbits and guinea pigs when we get them. He even found a way for tomatoes to grow, and they are not a plant that usually likes much water. He has a tree growing in there that he tells me is a great source of food for the animals as well, and he even had me plant a banana tree in there last week that seems to be growing like crazy. Other plants include water hyacinth, butternut squash and onions. All of these vegetables and grasses can be used to feed animals.

This is an elephant ear plant that I found growing in the river that flows near our property. I brought back 4 of them and planted them in the filter. They seem to be doing well so I think I will return to the river one of these days and get some more. The whole idea of this filter is to have as many plants in there as you can have, so they use as many nutrients as they can. The grasses and vegetables are also great because they can be cut down or picked which removes the nutrients and uses them for other things.

This is a little spider that I found crawling on one of the trees in the filter. His body was very shiny silver colour. I don't think it really showed up in the picture. I just marvel at God's creation. So to sum things up, this project has been both frustrating and fun. It has been a long time maturing to the point where it will actually filter the water but it has been fun experimenting with the different plants and fish. The odour has also been less than desirable but the beauty of the plants has been very enjoyable.