I am not the only one who had a birthday party recently – yesterday Holy Cross Anglican School turned four years old. The school enjoyed a big celebration  on Friday – please see photos on the Holy Cross School blog. The students made birthday cards – gathered together to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ – shared yummy cupcakes and everyone received a very special present. Thanks to the incredible folks at Southcrest Baptist Church in Lubbock, Texas each student (and teacher) received an age appropriate copy of the Bible for their very own.

As for my party Cindy and Molly picked us up a 7:50 and we all headed off to the bridge to meet Eric. First stop was the computer lab at Holy Cross to watch Current tv doc by Travis and  Gigi Harris video as a reminder of why we were there. Next we collected the wheel barrows rum punch and headed out to the new road.

I have to say even though it was Eric and Paul who were pushing the wheelbarrows it gave me a whole new perspective on walking the London bridges watching them. Luckily someone came along to help Eric by taking the rum punch and making his wheel barrow more stable. Paul said he found it very difficult to navigate – imagine if that was something you had to do on a daily basis with kids groceries or anything you needed to get to your home.

We met Cindy and Richard along the way they are back in town and as always out there volunteering and lending a helping hand in more ways than one – it was nice seeing them again.

When we got to the new road people were already in full force work mode so we set our stuff down and joined in. Paul opted for doing sand – mud and rock duty as that was heavy lifting. Cindy and I went for slightly lighter work taking wheelbarrows back and forth down the road and lifting smaller rocks. Cindy was also on tire pump detail and I tool loads of pictures as you can see. I really believe that everyone needs to see this effort and hopefully it will help encourage people to join in and help in what ever way they can. Cindy and I both agreed that we could have easily been cleaning up the garbage if we had long rubber boots good rubber gloves and a place to put it. Hoping to find some answers to that solution soon -  in order to really detoxify the land and make it safe for the community the garbage has to be gone.

It was a great experience to take part in the road building and I really hope that my documenting it will help bring more awareness to the San Mateo Empowerment Project and encourage people to get involved to help them in their goal to get the road finished. Their work is not easy  – almost every week Eric and members of the community show up to work on the road – they are averaging 25 ft a week. If you look at the pictures of the long stretch of road and then see how it turns a corner that amount of road was 4 months work. I wish there was some way to make it happen faster but am glad it is happening regardless.

After a hard mornings work we all headed back to the school for a delicious lunch made by Chef Victor and Miss Rosalie. Everyone sang a round of happy birthdays one for me and one for the school.