feb 18

February 18, 2009

I slept hard last night. M began snoring immediately, but after filling both ears with squishy yellow earplugs, I was good. Woke up to a weird dream of Jason Bateman flirting with me while I was trying to renovate a bathroom in an all girls’ school. Had yummy cereal again with blackberries, trying not to drool as everyone had biscuits, gravy, scrambled eggs and hot coffee.
This morning I went out to the site to work. I worked with Rockstar Hubby, D, H and a kid named Zach. Who, I found out later, is actually 30 years old, has two kids and is a pastor in Alberta. Oops. He looks 17. As I talked to him throughout the day, he still reminded me of a 17 year old.
We worked on a couple’s house. I hammered nails into the studs that were sticking out so they could hang new drywall. This house had been destroyed twice. Everyone’s had. There were two black marks in the duct work in the ‘living’ room. At my eye level, about 5’1” was where the water level had risen from the second hurricane, Ike. Above my head at 6’ was a mark from the first hurricane, Rita. Wow.
There’s a woman here whose birthday is today. A is 34. She has three kids, her oldest being 18. She’s single. I’m guessing she married her husband at a young age, but he shunned God. And it got so ugly that he was ‘hating’ her Christianity and her church and her family. So they’re divorced. She’s raising those three kids, by herself. Her youngest is 6. Which is so heartbreaking. But the funny thing is, there’s this guy, Ira, who is 22 and keeps coming around and flirts with her. She keeps saying things like, ‘my kids back home’ but he keeps asking her for her cell phone number. He’s so cute. Super short hair, tall and lanky, fishes for a living. He deep fried some fresh caught oysters and served them up to everyone. Dan said they were amazing. I didn’t try any, as I was not there, and I probably would have regurgitated everything onto his white wife beater.
The reason I wasn’t there, was because I was given 45 minutes to drive back, have a shower and then come pick them up to bring them back. It took me 20 minutes to get to our ‘home’. I threw water on my armpits and drove back in the torrential downpour. To discover that one of the workers, B, had split his head open when he fell. He was at the hospital getting stitches. Apparently, B is always the first to draw blood on mission trips. When he came back they had shaved part of his head and the rest of his hair was a dyed maroon from the blood. And he wasn’t able to wash it because he had to keep the wound clean. Ew.
Tomorrow is back to cooking, which I’m looking forward to. It’s nice doing some manual labour, but it was pretty boring and my arms were hurting pretty badly after all that hammering. I’m going to offer to do everyone’s laundry while they are working tomorrow. They’d probably enjoy some clean undies and nice-smelling dry towels for their showers afterwards.