Hi Family,

Well, I have been studying Spanish all day. I am not sure that I will have much to report because of it at the end of my mission other than I can communicate in poor Spanish. But no one will be able to say that I have not tried. I must study Spanish more hours than any other person alive. But right now my head is soggy with Spanish and so I have turned to our blog to read.

I thought I would share with you a little bit about our hobby. In our apartment we have a window to the world of construction in Ecuador.

Right after we got here we took this picture from our apartment window which is on the third floor of our apartment building.

This is December 30 2006. You can see they are building the second floor of this house. We were told that the first floor had been there for a couple of years. All is cement and cinder block. They use no wood. There is a family moving into the open area below and you can see that they are supporting the mechanism to make the second floor with bamboo polls.

By February 2007, they had made this progress. You can see they are ready to pour the cement on the second floor and the family on the ground floor got tired of us watching them cook breakfast.

By April they had poured the second floor and taken down the bamboo poles. I wish the pictures were larger and you can see the detail of starting to put in some plumbing. You can also see they have been working on the first floor and and have put in the large windows. By the way this is the back of the house. We have yet to see the front of the house because the street to the house is dirt and closed off so we cannot walk down it. Also it is interesting to note the house is on the edge of steep hill and so the ground in front of the bamboo poles slopes off really fast.

It is now June 2007, we are 6 months into construction and they are making progress. The second floor has walls of cinder block and they are starting to construct the retaining walls to protect the house from the hill side sliping away and also stairs to the property below which they also apparently own.

This is really interesting. You can see they have made a porch with cement railing. Quite pretty actually. You can see that they are going to build a wall extending out from the fence going along the side of the house. The man is making the support post. He mixes the cement by hand on the ground below and fills a bucket with cement, climbs the ladder and dumps the cement into the wooden form. This will become a "support post".

Well it is getting late. Our really fast internet is taking forever to down load these photos and I still have a year to go. So I will send this now and add to it later. The house is still not finished after a year and a half but it is really looking nice. Soon after the above photo was taken we noticed the the family was moving into the partially finished part on the first floor.

More later.