Sarah: Today was yet another day working on the house. It is kind of slow, because it’s all repair work, so we can’t just go in and do something. Whatever we are fixing must be examined, taken apart, fixed, and then if it goes smoothly, we can put it back together. Many times, there is something else wrong for which we must compensate, such as the house not being plumb or things not being measured or cut correctly. Sometimes we have to go get extra parts to finish what we’ve started. It can be a long process. Today we finished Rachael’s windows; we put in the last part, since they’re storm windows. We also finished her kitchen floor, which was neat. We laid the rest of the plywood and paper, and then we got to work laying the linoleum squares. I had to measure and cut many of the squares that needed to go in places where a 1’ by 1’ piece wouldn’t fit. PK started working on putting in a new window in Rachael’s bathroom. Her original window was the same size as the rest of the windows, but her shower covered up most of it; besides that, it was in bad shape. So he took that out and replaced much of the area where the window had been with wood; this means that we need to get some metal to replace the side of the house that now does not have a window. We’ll be using the extra linoleum flooring to redo the bathroom floor of the main house. We did not get a handicapped toilet today, and I have no idea when it will be coming. I feel like I am not helping much, though, because there is so much time in between jobs on this house, and not enough shovels for me to go down to the trenches and dig. An inspector came today and brought us some unpleasant news. Since the trenches were being dug around the water line, the digging crew had to cover up the twenty feet on the side where the pipe was and re-dig another twenty feet on the other side of the trenches. Everyone was so angry, especially PD (DE). He is very intense about his site, which is basically always a septic site. Usually more on the site is finished at this point in time than what we have done. But we did have a pleasant surprise for lunch. The Rice family bought us about eight Hot ‘n’ Ready pizzas, and we were so excited and happy. Then we had a massage train going, which felt wonderful. To break in her new kitchen floor, Rachael taught those of us who are working on her site how to salsa. It was so much fun, and Chloe (DE) filmed the whole thing on my camera. She and I had so much fun together, and I sang “A Whole New World” from the movie Aladdin to her. It was fantastic. We have done a lot of bonding since ASE began, even though we didn’t talk that much last year. And Mike put me in charge of the linoleum process, which was super neat. I think that it’s really cool that he trusts me that much to be in charge of a huge part of our job site. And then we came home and I hung out with Heather (OH), who is the coolest person in the world! We are best ASE buddies. That’s basically it for tonight. Off to state meetings.
Luke: Wednesday… its getting harder and harder to get up in the morning and I’m getting more and more sore. We really didn’t have all that much to do today but it turned out that we didn’t have all the materials we needed so Nikki ran back and forth from Lowes like fifty times while Jamie and I sunbathed on the roof of the house we’re working at. I got a little burnt around the shoulders. Tomorrow I’m seeing if I and a couple other people can transfer over to site one to do some heavy digging. Site three is basically done… and if we go there tomorrow we’ll just finish in the first hour and sit around doing nothing until we go back. I finally got around to playing basketball on my free time today. Either other stuff that I wanna do is going on or something else is being held in the gym, but I finally got in there and taught everybody how to play one bounce. Servant Event is going great and I can’t wait until tomorrow.
Adam: Sorry I forgot to journal yesterday, I was swept up with the business of servant event. Today went well at site 2. We moved rock, dug, burned a huge brush pile all morning, and even went water moccasin hunting with Ms. Cindy. She has a couple of ponds and sells her coy fish on craigslist. She said the water snake was hurting business. In the end, Cindy won and the snake sleeps with the fishes.
The kids at my site are awesome. They are good kids, hardworking, etc…we have some interesting conversations in the trenches. The girls at the site dance and sing in the van on the way back and the boys, or most of them sleep… Moral of the story: the girls are tougher.
Love you Lisa. Love you Hannah.
Rachael: Today was an adventure. We figured out that where we tried to dig our trenches was over the main water line and that is “against code” so we had to close in the trench over 30 feet!!! And rebuild it it was not good news but we did it and had fun! I have so much fun with everybody here, I’m dreading leaving!! I was so incredibly sore today when I woke up. I just hope tomorrow is better. I am looking forward to this weekend going to Marshall and white water rafting. But I have to go now! Buhbye
Mark: Well I have to hurry up because I only have about 6 minutes but today was really good! I know I said that we should get all our work done easily by today but we had a couple setbacks and we have to go back tomorrow to finish it up! I went under a crawlspace while we had to do some plumbing work. We are moving along really well and this time we should be done by the morning. I have to go now though so bye.
Seth: Today was fun. We started the day off by doing the same thing, digging. Unfortunately, we learned that we had to dig an extra twenty feet on each ditch because of a waterline. Today, everyone was more talkative and we had a good time. Love you mom and dad, good luck with work.
Nikki: I had a new experience today – I spent some time in the crawl space of the house we are working on assisting for some plumbing repair. The home is a double wide on a crawlspace, so there was not a lot of room down there. The project was hooking the line for the gray water (washing machine) into the main line to through the septic system. It was previously just piped out to the top of the hill behind the house. One of the youth on our site actually works in plumbing and he did the actual repair. This was maybe a half hour of my day, but was memorable. I am not sure when the last time is that I army crawled…probably when the boys were little.
The rest of my work day was spent running back and forth to Lowe’s for supplies. It is about a 15 minute trip from our site one-way. By the time you get there, find what you need and check out, then return, it takes anywhere form 45 minutes to 1 hour per trip, and I made four today.
Spiritual life tonight was excellent again. The main question was “If there is a god, why do people suffer?” I really like the theme this year, which is questions Christians are asked y the world. I wasn’t sure that I would in the beginning. It seemed like these big questions might cause more doubt and questioning for the youth, but it has sparked some excellent conversation, sharing, and prayer time. I have been in groups where a youth has said “I don’t really have an answer for that question, because I wonder that myself.” The good thing is that they are in an environment where they can share those musings without fear of ridicule and they receive good support and input. This answer has been the exception and not the rule though. I think that it is good to openly discuss some of these really philosophical questions that we all have struggled with or wondered about at some time or another in our life.
In one week we will be home. It doesn't seem like we have been here long enough yet for htat to be the case.
