A Long Day

I was at el comedor for almost nine hours today. I’m beat.

I showed up at 9:40am to be ready when Don Flores was supposed to arrive at 10am. He didn’t. Typical.

Valeria showed up around 10:30am and we walked to Don Flores house. He wasn’t there, again. His wife said he left to pick up supplies and planned to be at el comedor around 10. It appears the family doesn’t have a watch or clock because we told her it was already 10:30 and she looked surprised. So we waited.

Don Flores finally showed up around noon. He and his helper (some teenager) went about preparing the wall for the glue by “picando.” I don’t know how to say it in English because this department of vocabulary is unknown to me, but he used a chisel to pick at the wall and scrap off some of the paint. This took over three hours. During this time, I organized the order of the tiles, and starting tearing the blue and orange tiles from the cardboard backing holding each sheet together. My fingernails aren’t very happy with me. Also, after the cooks had eaten, I got a little help from two of the mothers, and later on, the nurse who comes regularly to take care of little kids in families around the neighborhood, helped me.

Don Flores original estimate was finishing the entire mural today and putting in the grout tomorrow. That was a lofty goal, and by 6:30pm we had finished a little less than half. However, we have all of tomorrow to finish it and we’ll put in the grout on Thursday. And once the letters are up for “La Floresta” the rest will be easy-breezy.

Tomorrow’s meeting time is 10:30am and I have higher hopes that he’ll show up on time. He no longer has an excuse to buy supplies…

It was a very successful day and I’m really excited how it looks so far. My only concern is whether or not the spray I put on the tiles to protect the marker will actually stay. Don Flores said he was cleaning them and a little bit wiped away. That’s really not good, especially since it could result in massive wear-and-tear over a short period of time—which is not what I want. Maybe I’ll try adding more “esmalte” tomorrow before we do the grout on Thursday…