Great Expectations

The first day at a worksite is always a surprise. We don’t know where we’re going, what the site will look like, and the extent of our jobs. This year we were sent to fix up Forbes and Lynetta’s house. This family of five is the hub of a small village. Their back yard is set up as a garden that helps feed their neighbors. It’s a pretty big yard compared to other’s we’ve worked on. It has a makeshift, four foot fence with plants randomly growing all over the place. Our goal is to clear out the area – pick up trash, move large rocks, level the land, and create a more organized garden.

Well within minutes the team went crazy. In the midst of our chaos, this yard was transformed. They organized a system of breaking the rock, shoveling into buckets, and dumping them over the fence. The garbage was eliminated, or relocated to over the fence. It seems odd not actually putting the trash in trash cans to be removed, but it’s just the way they do things down here. A task that Raoul stated in the morning should take us about a day and a half to two days was finished by 2:30. That’s just how we roll.

But the day did have a few mishaps. We were able to purchase for Karazim a portable canopy to be used at the worksite to provide some shade. After about an hour, Tom, James, and Warren were able to complete the task. It was gorgeous – was. It was awfully breezy today, more so than usual. A strong gust bent and broke some of the side bars on one of the extension pieces. Tomorrow we will try to fix it. A few people got a little dehydrated or got headaches. And finally, I got stung by 7 wasps trying to retrieve a bucket that was dropped on the other side of the fence – courtesy of Dan Marr. I may change the name of the blog to "Bee stung for Jesus." Unfortunately, I couldn't get Jeff Hill's camera to load the pictures because he got a few good ones of my stings. Thank goodness for Carrie Steele because she nursed me back to health.

Tomorrow we will start assembling the frames for the raised gardens and a new project of building two arbors to house the vegetable flats. A group will be painting the house and another will be on the roof patching a hole. It’s gonna be another busy one.