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.

October Update

The month of October began with an announcement that the Lima Childrens home had finally gotten approval to move to their new home in Pachacamac in February 2010. That was very exciting news but it also meant that we at Kids Alive Peru construction had a lot of work on our plates to get the new home ready. Through planning meetings it was determined that in order for the move to go smoothly we would need to have houses 1 through 4 completely finished and house 5 usable as a central kitchen. Well at the beginning of this month house 5 got underway in construction, we bought and started laying tiles in house 3 and we started planning for a team from Forward Baptist in Cambridge.

We are now at the end of October and the shell of house 5 is completed. Eduardo, Roy and myself have just about completed the tiles. We have had windows installed in house 3 and the Forward Baptist team has come and gone. During their time here the team painted house number 4, installed all interior doors on houses 3 and 4, completed all baseboards in house 3 and grouted all the tiles. They roofed a covered work area preparing for next years teams, installed many toilets, showers, laundry sinks and a water tank. They also did lots of gardening in the area of our septic system. The team had finished all the work that I had planned for them with one day remaining. During their time here we had received a couple inquiries into whether or not we could accomodate some chickens on our property. With just a day left I proposed to the team that we build a chicken coop and get our egg production underway. With a master homebuilder and a former farmgirl leading the way, the team came up with plans for the chicken coop that you see below. Not bad for one days work.

So the chickens are happy in their new home, but we still need to get the children into theirs. Eduardo and I will be very busy over the next two months. Our plan is to get windows installed on house number 4, install tiles in house number 4, probably finish the bathrooms in house 4 and find a good source for exterior doors for the next 3 houses. We are still a ways off from being able to realize our goal. In the new year we need a steady stream of teams to help us reach that goal of a February move-in so if you are feeling like you would like to help us, either financially or as a part of a work team, contact the Kids Alive office and we would be glad to talk to you.

Marieta's House

For many of you who have been here to Peru in the past you will remember Marieta or at least he two very energetic children Jose Maria and Fatima. You may also know that at least once a year we like to chose a local family and help them in some way or another by fixing something at their house or making their house bigger if need be. This year we decided to help Marieta and her kids by building an addition onto their already existing house. The addition was actually the same size as what she already had so we would be doubling her living space.

The only problem with the whole plan was that Marieta was already living on the only flat piece of land that she owned. All the rest of her property was hill. Well that wasn't going to stop a determined group of guys from People Church in Wyoming. That's right Walt and his band of youngsters took on the challenge and excavated a piece of land 3 metres by 4 metres and almost 2 metres deep. Then with a team of young people from Bethel Church we built the house and were able to buy a bed and 2 new mattresses for Marieta and her kids. Something for you teams for 2010 to think about is the fact that Marieta does not have a bathroom and making one because of the type of terrain that she has would be a several day project for a willing group.

Catch-up update

Well as you can see by the date of the previous post it has been a while since I have updated the blog. Sorry to all of you who follow it faithfully. I guess with a streak of teams keeping me busy I have just gotten away from it.
In Manchay at the Oasis Care Center we have laid grass in our new park area. We have poured concrete on another nearly 20 meters of driveway. We have removed the mountain of rubble from outside at the street. We have finished the new office complex and everyone is enjoying their new surroundings. Our new moms clothing business has moved into their new workshop and are turning out lots of clothing. We added another section of fencing to our volleyball court which is helping to coral the balls better. We cut out the midsection of the staircase leading upstairs of the workshop and put in a landing which is used to get to the second floor of the office building. As you can see there has been a lot accomplished in the past couple weeks. Thank you to all the work teams who made all of this possible.
Work in Pachacamac has been kind of slow for the last little while. That is not to say that it hasn't advanced at all but we can only be in one place at a time. Construction is just beginning on the 5th house which we are very excited about. The kitchen and bathroom counters have been built in the 3rd house and the 4th house has been painted with primer. A team from Bethel Church which was comprised of mainly young people did a huge cleanup on the property and then laid gravel on the driveway and some sidewalks. Lately we have started our garden project with which we will start growing food for our rabbit project. We have also gotten fed up with our water treatment system not running at optimum potential, so we consulted the engineer another time and he has us filling the filter with more plants. This week we will work more on the garden project to get some seeds in the ground and buy tiles for the third house.
Also in the last couple months I made a trip to Andahuaylas. There I visited a childrens home which has recently come under Kids Alive. I checked out the construction of their new homes and visited many hardware stores to see what materials are available. The trip was very exciting and the construction was very impressive.