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Houses in Ecuador are a bit different than the standard American house in that they generally hardly consist of more than concrete walls and a roof. Which means our house building was mainly hole digging, rock shoveling, large rock moving (by hand), and concrete mixing. And by concrete mixing I mean taking 2 wheelbarrows full of rocks, 2 wheelbarrows full of dirt, 1 bag of cement mix, many buckets of water and having a few people with shovels constantly stirring the mix around until it gets to the right consistency. At this point you have to continue mixing it so it doesn’t harden and shovel it into buckets which are then passed through a line of people to its destination.

I was enthusiastic about all this and kicked some serious concrete ass the first two days. Okay, mentally I was enthusiastic about it for the rest of the time as well, but physically I felt like every inch of me had been beaten with a baseball bat when I woke up Wednesday morning. My frail raised-indoors-on-computer-games body was not used to this manual labor. I lost some steam midway through the week once bending down to pick up my shovel became a painful activity but was thankfully relieved of my constant concrete mixing command by reinforcements who came from the other work site.