Ready to Pour the Floor!

Click here to see/hear a song from Seminary Chapel Wednesday morning

Chapel at the Seminary today. We presented Gideon Bibles to the students and staff

Ring beam is done and now we prepare for pouring the floor.

Moving dirt from the high places to low paces to prepare for the floor

The morning Juniors and Seniors at 7AM lined up to sing the national anthem before heading to class

Today the crew took the form boards off the concrete poured yesterday and reattached them atop the last sections of block yet to receive the ring beam concrete. By mid morning that process was done and we were ready for concrete. However the mixer had different plans. It ran for a about a minute before stopping for good. Fortunately the immediate problem was the familiar spark plug issue which indicates a much bigger issue of oil getting into places oil is not supposed to go. This time the plug could not be cleaned well enough to make the mixer run again, so over lunch Carlos got another spark plug to try after lunch.

In the mean time this morning Tim and I, accompanied also by Vivian and Connie attended the Wednesday morning Seminary service to distribute Gideon Bibles to the students, faculty and staff of the seminary. We met with all the students in the Junior Senior, college prep program last week. The seminary students number about 45, so it is a much smaller group but preparing pastors for the ministry is the original and still core purpose for the Seminary to exist. It is a wonderful thing to have the high school program on campus as well and the two programs complement each other well and bring the campus a vitality and energy that would not be here if they had not expanded the ministry to include educating the college prep students.

Right after lunch we quickly learned that the new spark plug was not the answer to fixing the mixer. After an hour of tinkering the decision was made to give up on the gasoline mixer and go see if the diesel mixer in the back of the storage garage still runs. It actually started pretty easily in the garage which was surprising. So we towed the diesel mixer down to the work site behind the truck. But after fueling it up and topping off the oil, the mixer would not start. Eventually we gave up on that mixer as well and Faruke, Lucas and some seminary students set out to mix several big batches of concrete on the ground. We then wheel barrowed the concrete to the final sections of ring beam to be poured. By mid afternoon the ring beam was poured. Then we spent the rest of the day moving and leveling dirt to prepare for pouring the concrete slab tomorrow.

Late in the day the mechanic who takes care of the equipment on campus came in from his work and fixed the diesel mixer. So it is now running and should be very helpful for pouring as much of the floor as we can before our time working here comes to an end tomorrow afternoon. It is my understanding that the Bauza’s, Faruke and Lucas will continue to work with the seminary students to finish the floor after we leave. Eventually the roof will be put over the court and rooms will probably be added on to the end of the building. There are a couple of similar structures at other schools in the neighborhood so we can see about what the finished project will look like even if we never get to see this building completed.

  

The manual labor and the heat are wearing us down but the food, fellowship and your prayers have kept us going. Just one more day to labor and we pray that it we will have the strength to make it a productive one.