And so it continues:

While the brothers were making marked progress on the back wall, Dad and Madd and I turned up like bad pennies a couple of hours late. Dad had been working on an idea he had for the windows, which everyone knew we wouldn’t get installed by Sunday. Instead of putting black paper or some similar light blocking object in the windows, Dad thought it would be nice to cut stained glass window shapes out of black paper and sandwich them between plastic. The trial window was made in our house, which accounted for why we turned up two hours late at the construction site. Oops. 

Working on the back wall/roof

We hadn’t been working very long before Daniel the Interpreter dropped by saying he wanted to catch up with us before we left. He lives five hours bus drive from here and was there for us on our first day in Los Alamos.  Madd and I told Dad to go have lunch with Daniel at home – we were happy enough working on the stained glass windows and he wasn’t in the middle of anything big. Realizing the great wisdom of our words, he followed our counsel and disappeared. Quite honestly Madd and I wondered what the point was making windows when it took so long and there was no guarantee they would work.

Yes, we were bored.

That night we went to David’s place for dinner and met his beautiful wife and son, and though everyone was tired we spent a delightful evening getting to know them better. David is the English teacher who has been interpreting most of Dad's sermons. His wife is a primary teacher, and once we sat down to cenar we got on like a house on fire.

 On Thursday the work on the back wall continued, and some of the brothers began replacing temporary pillars under the second story with six by six pillars of native Chileano wood. Meanwhile, Dad and I were battling the wind to install our plastic windows. We discovered that nailing the edges of the plastic down with timber made the window stretch out tightly enough. Ironically, I hit a finger with the hammer and peeled the top  of my finger tip back. It was a different finger to last time, but after Rossi cleaned it I had to go home to bandage it up. Rossi told Dad she was glad we were leaving soon because she was tired of cleaning up smashed fingers!

porcelain painting inside.

Juan-Carlos dropped by to inspect the work site, and because he liked our windows he sent Brother George off to buy more material so we could fill every window space with Dad’s plastic creations. How we groaned when we learnt there were more to be made! That afternoon the wind threw rain against the windows, and water dripped down from the unfinished sections of the roof.  The big enclosed space felt like a cave in a rain-forest,  and was equally as wet.  Hermano Roberto showed the electricians how to fabricate rain jackets out of plastic sheets from the insulation. With a hole poked through the top and wire tied around their waists, the electricians continued their work unhindered.    

   

This photo is a bit dark, but those are the electricians...

We had to iron the sheets of plastic together. It took forever.

Insulation.

Every evening of our last week in Los Alamos was booked out. Rossi asked us to prepare some bush dances to show people during the festivities of the weekend,  and we spent an evening just dancing. As our family isn’t big enough, we asked some of our friends if they’d be willing to partner us. We told them bush dancing was easy, and they hesitatingly promised to try the dances. We kindly told them that if they didn’t want to dance at the end of the evening they could bow out.      

 We considered calling it off because it was raining hard and most people don't have cars in Los Alamos. The fact that we would have to talk to them on the phone with our limited Spanish vocabulary made us strum our heels instead, and they all turned up in the long run! It was rather like a disco night as every now and then the lights would flicker, or turn off completely, but everyone had an utter ball. We taught them The Waves of Bondi, and the Heel and Toe Polka. We did a couple of other dances too, but failed when we tried the Pride of Erin! They danced the Cuaca which is the Chileano National dance, and kept asking us what our national dance was, haha. We finished the evening with a light supper and lots of laughter, and when they left we were certain that everyone had enjoyed themselves. Moreover, they'd learnt some new moves and were confidant to meet whatever the weekend held.