Days 4-5 – 2012 ABCRM Czech Republic Mission Trip

When our mission team arrived in Konstantinovy Lazne on Friday August 31, and saw the bare flat concrete slab at the new Konstantinovy Lazne Baptist Church construction site where new walls would be built, it was difficult for us to imagine how much we could accomplish in just 3.5 work days working with six members of the church.  However, on Monday, September 2 after we’d finished breakfast and read/discussed the daily ABC-IM Short Term Missions “Watch for God at Work” devotional guide at the inn, we optimistically walked to the site only 100 feet from the inn to begin our first workday.  The church’s construction project manager put us to work by first moving bricks from a storage area next to the site to the concrete slab.  The church’s workers started immediately laying the first rows of bricks for the new walls, and the construction project was off and running!

As described in the “Watch for God at Work” guide, our mission team members acted as servants to the church’s workers (who were construction experts) by continuing to deliver to them bricks they needed for the wall-building.  With the bricks being covered with an orange powder than easily rubbed off, our clothes became covered with dust within the first hour of work, but it didn’t bother us in the least.   The building of the walls went amazing fast, and by the time we took a lunch break, we could already see how the architect’s rendition of their new church building we’d seen was becoming real.

After our lunch, our mission team and the church’s construction workers kept doing the same thing to making the walls higher until they reached the height of the first floor (9 feet(,  By the end of the first work day, some of the walls had reached 5-6 feet in height.  Although it was a tiring day, our mission team was happy we’d accomplished so much with our Konstantinovy Baptist Church fiends.

  

On Tuesday, September 4, we kept the same schedule as on Monday, starting our work at the construction site at 9:00 a.m.  Because the walls were now too high to add new bricks from the floor, scaffolding was assembled for the outside walls, and the church’s construction workers began adding new layers of bricks.  On of our team members (Joe Kong) decided to try building a short interior wall, and it turned out looking pretty good.  Also, the church’s construction leader asked Clara to be the mixer for the glue that held the bricks together, and she did a got job at that too.  By 3 p.m., the first outside wall reached the height of 9 feet.  By the end of the day, we could no longer look across the concrete slab that had been completely flat on Monday morning.

By the end of Tuesday, the new walls for the first floor walls were far enough along that they will be completed on Wednesday.  Our mission team will then be doing other construction tasks since it will take some time to install the steel beams for the second floor.  Tuesday was another tiring day, but our team members were very happy about all the progress that has been made so far.  We are so thankful the Lord has led us to this project with the Konstantinovy Lazne Baptist Church!