Day 28 (09-23-10)

6:30am. I’m first in line for the bus. The Habitat For Humanity trip was sold out, so I’m hoping that partied too hard last night and I can steal their spot. No problem. Apparently several people were in that situation, because 4 or 5 of us were able to get onto the trip. Hooray! Time to drive 3.5 hours to Assin Faso.

Upon our arrival to the village, we were assigned to one of three houses. One of them was already built and roofed, it just needed some detail work leveling the floors and touching up the walls. The other two houses were still at the foundation level, and floors had not even been poured yet. I was working on the least-completed house, and our main job was to haul cinder blocks from a nearby field onto the worksite. Once we had assembled a large enough quantity, we helped the local workers to mix mortar and start placing the cement blocks into their appropriate places in the walls. Unfortunately, our group was rather large (even when split amongst 3 sites), and the local Habitat branch had few tools for us to use. Instead of having a group of 20 people applying layers of mortar to the cinder blocks, we could only have 4 people doing it at a time. But we were still able to do a great deal of work in the short amount of time (3-4 hours) that we had. Some of the locals provided us a great lunch of fried chicken and rice with orange Fanta.

Afterward, we left for the journey back to Takoradi. Our bus had to stop to get air in its tires at some point? It was weird, and I was sleeping, so I’m not entirely sure what happened. But apparently we stopped for 30 or 40 minutes and our driver got out to talk to the people that ran the gas station while the tired were filled. We didn’t really know what was going on, but we continued and made it back to the port in the evening. After some dinner and a shower, I kept it low key again and stayed on the ship for the night. Habitat drained my energy, Takoradi doesn’t have very much in terms of nightlife, and I have another SAS trip tomorrow morning at 8am. All of that = bedtime.