Wall near stairs, new volunteer Wouter

This week no update about Ans her glass creations, although she is daily creating beautiful new objects. I will share more info with you about this next week. You can also check out her Instagram account at: www.instagram.com/ansglassart (unfortunately /AnsArt has already been taken, although this is a non active account.

Wouter is a 21 year old volunteer from The Netherlands. He is here since 2 weeks now and what a pleasant person to work with. He has just graduated from construction engineering and decided not continue the rat race in which most people are locked in since the age of 4 year. One of the reasons was that he found his education a bit too theoretical. In his own words he stated: "I am supposed to tell brick layers to increase productivity but I have never laid a brick on another." Well... here at La Mina San Cayetano he is learning many practical things as we are still busy with creating the wall along the stair case near our house. I expected that removing the layer of the shit stuff from the coal mine would take max 1 week, but it's now the end of the second week and have just managed to complete the stage where it only gets worse and worse. I thought there was a layer of 2 meter of the relatively easy to remove mix of coal dust and bad coal, but very quickly we reached the original soil which contains big to huge boulders, embedded in very compact clay. The small excavator which is on site has a hard time getting it out and we called in the help of the non explosive agent Splitstar to break the bigger rocks. But... around 3 PM this afternoon we placed the first stone in the continuation of the wall, which is the biggest stone we got out - it weighs probably more than 500 kg.

We are all very happy that we can finally start creating the wall, so we expect some decent progress by the end of next week. The next update about the wall will be the final stage which will take at least another few month, as some other tasks and project have to be done as well like supporting Ans with making more wooden stands, chipping branches etc.