I have just returned from a 2 week trip in Braga, Portugal where I participated in the Habitat for Humanity program.
A group of 15 of us traveled to a village outside of Braga and worked on the roof of a house which was being made for a Portugese family who was in need of a larger house. Before the trip I did not really know what to expect. I was pleasently suprised when we walked into the loby of one of the nicest hotels in the city. I thought that if we were lucky, we might have been staying in a hotel that had a bathroom in each room.
We had a private van that took us to and from the worksite each day. It picked us up at 8:30 each morning and took us back at 5:00 each evening. At the worksite we had two formen who only spoke Portugues and a team leader who spoke both Portuges and English. Our objective was to build the roof.
Most of the days that we were there we had lovely weather. It did however rain heavely for two of the days that we were supposed to work. One of those days were cut short because there was too much rain for us to work safely. The mother of the family that we were building the house for made us lunch everyday. She made more food then we could have possibly have eaten.
After working each day we would have the evenings to ourselves to do with what we wanted.
Our team leaders were very helpful. on our days off they showed us around Braga and one of them went with us to Porto for our last day. Everything went very well. We pretty much finished the roof (we finished everthing that they wanted us to do).
Portugal was amazing and everyone was great to us. I believe we all had a really good time working on the house and we are all happier for doing it.
For me, I will try to join Habitat again in the near futur.
