It's like a miracle . . .

Yesterday, the landlord's workmen came to our house, along with a crew they had hired of about a dozen additional workers, and poured a new layer of concrete on our roof. The group arrived early in the morning, and with the exception of my having to listen to a cement mixer outside my bedroom window all day, the event wasn't overly disruptive to our day.

In fact, we should have paid them something for the entertainment they provided for David all morning. David is looked upon as a sort of amazing child prodigy by the local Hondurans - because he can speak English. He loves hanging around work sites, and he brought glasses of water to the workers all morning. The workers seemed to enjoy having David around as much as he enjoyed being with them.

During the lunch break, though, there was a bit of a problem. The lead workman of the hired crew approached us, to explain that one of his workers was quite drunk, and was threatening to kill someone with a machete. He wanted us to do something about this, as the landlord's workmen, who were overseeing this hired crew, were away at that time. Of course, we hadn't a clue what to do. Looking out the window, we could see that the rest of the workers were just calmly sitting and eating lunch. The drunk guy was walking around a bit, and loudly preaching something into the air . . . but he didn't have any weapon, and no one else was paying any attention to him.

We decided to just stay out of the whole thing - it's not like the insertion of a woman into this situation was likely to improve anything - but we did have David come into the house for a while. Eventually, the landlord's men returned, and work started up again as though nothing unusual had happened. The drunk guy hung about, not working that I could see, but not doing anything else, either. (Kirstin just told me that he had sobered up enough to help clean up at the end of the day, although he was clearly still quite wobbly.) I have to admit that I don't exactly understand the dynamics of the situation. Shouldn't the drunken guy have been chastized, probably fired, definitely sent off the worksite? Well, that's what we would do in the US, but apparently that isn't the obvious decision here.

In spite of the mid-day excitement, the work was completed long enough before the late afternoon rains arrived, so there was time for the crew to clean up their trash and move their equipment out of the yard.

The rains started just around 5:30, which was early enough to have me wondering if the new roof was dry enough to handle it. The rains started out very heavy, and continued heavy for hours (at least until 1 AM), and we did not have a single leak in our house! This is amazing enough to count as a small miracle in my book, after the problems we have endured due to the many, many leaks in this roof!

Okay, I know, we have less than a week more to live in this house . . . but for the rest of our short time here, we'll be rejoicing at not having to deal with roof leaks potentially getting our piles of packed boxes wet!