Sunday, January 28, 2007

We are underway once again, we are heading north, ultimate destination, Sea of Cortez but for now we are headed to Manzanillo to visit with 2 of our daughters and their spouses. Trish and Jen are going to south of Manzanillo to surf for 3 and 2 weeks respectively. We can't wait to see them. We had a great sail to Isla Grande yesterday, which is just 6 miles north of Zihua, we are hoping to get to an anchorage that is 65 miles up the coast tonight, we were underway at 0530.
We had a wonderful experience yesterday. We helped to build a storage shed for the materials for a new school that is going to be built up high on the hillside in Zihuatanejo. What an example of co-operation and comradeship. Lending a hand were cruisers, visitors that were land based, teachers, and parents of students that will be attending the school. When we arrived a frame had already been constructed and it was up to us to put the sides on and make a floor. To construct the floor we all went to work and got rocks from the fill that had been generated when the site had been leveled. There must have been about 40 people there and everyone went and picked up rocks ranging in size from easy to pick up ones to rocks where two men were huffing and puffing while they were carrying them. In an hour we had filled in the 12 foot by 20 foot space, the depth varied from one end to the other, the one end being about 18 inches and the other was almost even with the bottom of the frame.
After we had piled up the rocks we then went to work getting dirt and small rocks to fill in. I had a crow bar and just kept digging into the hillside loosening up the dirt. A young woman had a pail and she would come and we would fill up the pail and she would take it to empty it on the floor as I continued to loosen dirt. There were people inside the frame with rakes, leveling out the floor and then one woman built a tamper out of wood and she pounded on the floor until it was packed and level.
Meanwhile there were two men on the roof and roofing material was being hoisted up and nailed on. Then the sides were put on, the sides were boards sawn from coconut trees and Barry said they were very hard and it was tough to put the nails through them. When we left all the sides were up, the floor was level, the door was being put on and the roof was being bolted down. They hung a sign on the shed,it had the nae of the school and the organizations that are co-operating to build it. The name of the school is going to be Octavio Paz, he is a Mexican fellow that won the Nobel Prize for literature and is famous for his humanitarian deeds. I am really happy that we stayed in Zee to help out with this worthy cause and hopefully when we head south next year we will be able to go up to the site and see what progress has been made in building the new school.