Day 6... building a banana raft

We awoke to a bright and sunny morning. Good in England, extremely problematic in India; working in the heat was going to be a major challenge. With bucketloads of water in tow, and with all windows on the fun bus open, we headed for Jai’s.
Today was slightly different in that the verandah had been completed, so it was all hands on deck at the house site. We arrived to find extra builders, making the total number of people on site 25! The ‘verandah boys’ immediately got to work highlighting the inadequacies of our brick throwing technique, and despite some scepticism from us, actually managed to up the efficiency with the ‘4 bricks passing manoeuvre’. We were almost too efficient from then on, with a mountain of bricks appearing in the house, and us then forced to sit around for half an hour! We watched as the house grew taller and taller. By lunchtime it was getting up to ten feet in height and the wood from the day before was used to make some very shaky looking scaffolding. We didn’t go anywhere near it…

Lunch came and went, with the only notable event being Church almost swinging himself into a brick wall in his exuberance over the rope swing. Hughes and Batley were relieved when we went back to the comparative safety of the building site! No more sitting around - it was time to get concreting. This involved a lot of hauling of sand, gravel chips, water and then mixing it all together. The latter was back-breakingly hard, and only the nutter local could manage it for longer than five minutes. Then came pouring the cement onto the surfaces and smoothing it down; all very satisfying when it was done and we left feeling very pleased with ourselves. We then all carried some banana tree trunks back to the house for raft building tomorrow. Again, we were all intrigued…

Dance practice saw Jai getting more and more hacked off, and us more and more unable to hold our concentration. When we’d sort of got through steps 1-6, he put us out of our misery and allowed us to go home. Over half the project done now!