From utilizing the sand from termite hills to hand chiseling each stone for the foundation, the primitive craftsmanship that goes into every single detail of this construction is remarkable. I was assigned to work with a handful of younger guys who were shoveling stone chips that had been mixed with mud into wheelbarrows. Then we’d run the wheelbarrows across wood planks and over a maze of five-foot deep trenches dug for all the walls of the orphanage. This was the concrete for the foundation. The language barrier was steep, but as with anything in life, what brought us together were a few missteps and funny moments. Not even an hour into our day and I had ripped the ass out of my pants. The rest of the day, I was two boxer brief’d cheeks in the breeze for all to see. And for all the laughs and high-fives it got, it was just fine. No more than an hour after the pants incident, the palm of my hand started driving me crazy. Irritated from the splintering wood of the shovel and the beginning of a blister, I pressed on to keep up with the Kenyan dude shoveling next to me at twice my speed. Or was that David DeMarchis? Either way, they were better at everything than me. Next thing I know, I had torn a little 2-inch flap on the palm of my hand.

The pain was pretty distracting to say the least, but the worst part was that there wasn’t any clean water to wash it. The well water or water from the basins in Kenya are riddled with bacteria and parasites and the thought of dunking my hand in it was freaking me out a little. We found a first aid kit and did the best we could with some gauze and bacitracin. I put a sweaty glove over it for protection and was quickly reassigned to “moving rocks” duty. When we got back to where we were staying, I had to peel back the “flap” and wash it out with bottled water. We’ll call that “character building.” We wrapped it in more gauze and finished it off with a few rounds of duct tape to keep the kids from poking at it. With no surprise, the kids loved it. The first day they saw it they huddled around me in droves whispering, “oooo, tck tck tck, sorry sorry Nate,” like little whispering chants of consolation.